File Back Up System for long term storage

2oldman wrote:

vermilye wrote:
eventually your older stored data may become inaccessible, or very expensive to have someone specializing in data rescue retrieve it for you.

It's also my opinion that not being a data hoarder will serve you well. I doubt I'll ever need a Terrabyte of storage, since I do my best to delete lousy pictures and unneeded documents before deciding to store them.

Things you cannot find are things you do not have.

So true of words!

Deleting old outdated documents which are no longer relevant or needed helps to thin out the herd of files to backup.

BUT, pictures and digital movie files (camcorders) to me are extremely valuable and worthy of at least a half hearted attempt to ensure they do "survive" over the years.

I just finished two major and time consuming projects that I started nearly 10 yrs ago..

#1 was to scan in all of my Dads old 35mm slides,then identify places and people on the slides. Additionally many of the slides had deteriorated, badly either darkened or the dyes shifted color severely.. 1,500 slides..

Unfortunately I did not "complete" the entire job before my Mom passed so I had well over 400 slides that I was only able to partially identify the people..

Burned data DVDs and gave those to my Brothers and Sisters for this years Christmas.

#2 was to digitize all of my Dad's Super 8mm film, Dad's projector broke back in 2008 (unrepairable due to a plastic gear giving up) so I managed to find another used projector and was able to repair it, ran until the bulb burned out then had a difficult time finding a good bulb.. Finished this project this year and it turned out 3.5hrs worth of video.

Planning to copy all the slide files plus the HD video files of the film to several USB HDs shortly..

As far as deleting "bad" photos, I rarely delete photos.. I find even ones that didn't turn out the way I want tend to be cool or a different perspective.. Only badly blurred/focused might hit the cutting room floor..

Digital photos take very little storage space considering the size of todays HDs..

The main thing now days is to not get hung up on depending on ONE form of backup.. Optical media, flash memory (USB flash and digital memory cards) can and do fail and when they do ALL the data will be lost.

You also need to be "flexible" in your file formats, just like 35mm slides, negatives and even super8 film can and will deteriorate over time and are rather obsolete.. And are irreplaceable memories when damaged are gone forever..

You may need to revisit your stored away files in the future and "convert" them to a file format which is being used at that time (yes, I do feel eventually even file formats may become obsolete and finding software to open them could get difficult in the future).

Not to mention the possibility of memory cards going obsolete (Sony Memory stick, Multi Media Card, Xd, Smart Media Card just to name a few obsolete cards)..