One Reason Why Film Rules

[Bill Burk]

Do you have thumbnails from the catalog program? Did you post any on social media sites or email to anyone? Did you put any on removable storage? Just thinking about different ways I found several "good" shots after a similar incident.

[daleeman]

My grand father really loved photography. Loved animals and was a vet and owned a medical lab for running tests in the late 1880+ I have many of his printed images, very few negs. Others along the way must not have thought negs were not important. I have printed images from my father, few negs too.

For myself I have "pounds & pounds of negs and slides" plus many prints. Many prints, more mounted than loose. I also have a library index card file from a library filled with CDs and data DVDs. Several hard drives on the shelf filled with digital images since 2003 when I got my first DSLR (Nikon D100). Unfortunaly all of it is in the same home, ours. I know better but, failed to act as yet on off site storage.

Your loss is tough, but it is my motivation. Hope you can recover some of it.

[brianmquinn]

For those who care to learn from my mistake.

My home computer has two physical hard drives. The C drive for the OS and programs and a D drive for data storage.

I copy from my camera to a folder I set up on the Desktop C drive. That way I see it everyday and after I get a few it is a nagging reminder to catalog and file these images. As I said in this case a had about 6 weeks of photos to go through. I organized them and copied them to the D Drive. As soon as I did all that work I did a full overnight backup. I did not realize it at the time but the files did not copy properly to the D drive. So I got a backup of corrupt files. OOPS!

If I had gone and checked the files manually I would have seen they did not copy properly. So over the next 2 months I made several more backups of garbage. When I did go to get the photos when someone requested them they were not readable. I did have six perfect copies of corrupt files.

Other aspects of my “perfect” system were.
Two external hard drives. I do a full backup once a week and do another backup of new of changed files mid week. On Mondays I unhook the drive connected to my home computer and take it to work and bring the other dive home with me to start the process again. That way I always have an off site backup in case my house burns down. Each drive is large enough to copy my computer three times hence my six copies.

As MartinP pointed out I need to be more careful. Any by the way the issue was that my D hard drive was failing and I have replaced it. This was the first symptom of the impending total failure that it had.

I also do all of my own B&W developing and have scanned untold thousands of negatives and slides. I do not want to even think of how may hours of work I would lose if I had no backup.

Now that I am worried about a tornado where do I store my negatives? Perhaps I need a bomb shelter :-)

[Sal Santamaura]

...Now that I am worried about a tornado where do I store my negatives?...

Here:

http://www.undergroundvaults.com/

[MARKNABIA]

[QUOTE=brianmquinn;141671

Now that I am worried about a tornado where do I store my negatives? Perhaps I need a bomb shelter :-)[/QUOTE]


i hav safety deposite box on my bank that i use to put all my important film...usb back up external hard drive...etc
And i have vault at home for my cameras...


http://www.sentrysafe.com/Series/112...lts_Fire_Safes

[mark]

Been there, experienced it, cried in my beer, bought film.

[RedSun]

Sandy could have ruined all of them. But do you want to store all your personal photos at off-site public storage? I do not.

[brianmquinn]

Sandy could have ruined all of them. But do you want to store all your personal photos at off-site public storage? I do not.

Exactly! I cannot tell you how may times I have been printing in the darkroom and stuff I am working on triggers a memory. I pull an old set of negatives and start printing from that batch. That would not be possible with off site storage.

I must say I have printed less than 5 % of all of the B&W negatives I have shot. I have scanned 95% of them however.

[Brian C. Miller]

If I had gone and checked the files manually I would have seen they did not copy properly.

chkdsk c: /f
chkdsk d: /f
xcopy c:\path d:\path /vs

Robocopy also has options for file verification.

One of the problems with off-site storage is that it can get wiped out, too. Keeping things is waterproof cases with some desicant is a good idea. There aren't any cases which will protect film against fire, though. All of the fireproof safes protect paper against fire, but film has a lower temperature where it can be ruined.

[semi-ambivalent]

Brian,

If you're going to keep the same regimen I'd reformat those drives, every time, before a backup is written to them. This will let the drive update its bad block list. Stop and go is hard on a drive; don't do it . And, not to get into a holy war, but I've rarely had issues with Linux's ext{2 and 3} filesystems, and I've never had issues with BSD's {UFS1 and UFS2} filesystems. You can do better than Windows. If you're managing that much important data you shouldn't be running it on consumer grade crap, no matter what it costs you. False savings. Real data protection is a lot more complicated than getting another 2TB drive from Big Comp Storefront.

Good luck and post your progress (maybe in the lounge; this *is* APUG )

s-a