Articles from Parent Magazine
by Matthew Panzarino
Preserving Your Digital Photos
Digital photos require special care to make sure they aren’t damaged or lost. Hard drives are a much more impermanent medium than the old fashioned negatives. If not properly archived, a single power surge or hard drive failure can wipe out your digital photo collection. A mistake in editing or saving can overwrite the original photo (your negative) with a new file, making the old one impossible to recover. A few simple archiving steps can help you to avoid these dangers.
The first step to archiving your digital photos should be to record them to CD or DVD. No questions, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Doing this as soon as you come home from a trip or finish an event will be a lifesaver, trust me. The second step should be to make prints, but we’ll get to that in a future article.
My use of the term “archiving” is a bit misleading since you’re not really storing permanently, what you are doing is saving your images to the currently best available storage medium, a CD or DVD, while waiting for the next best available storage medium to come along, sort of like the progression of tape to CD or VHS to DVD (8 track to tape anyone?). Contrary to popular belief, most CDs and DVDs do have a shelf life, which is sufficiently long that when the next inexpensive storage standard comes along you can move your archived images to that new medium.
There are a couple of rules about CDs/DVDs to ensure maximum archival life; Use good quality, recognized brand name CDs/DVDs, no cheap no-name brands. With CDs, you get what you pay for. Do NOT put paper labels on the CDs/DVDs, label with a soft-tip marker. Make 2 copies of the CD/DVD, store them in different places. Feel free to come by the store to let us show you how to get your digital images archived and to show you some of the new types of CDs and DVDs which have an shelf life of over 100 years.
