In the early days of Digital Photography, we were advised to keep everything. We were also advised to back-up our data to CD's, or DVD's. Very sound advice, especially as CD's were considered incorruptible, subject to being kept in a reasonable environment. Some years later, there were mutterings that CD's weren't as safe as everyone originally thought and there were quite a few reports of problems.
Now that my new "Study" is finished, I am going through years of accumulated stuff that has been filling up shelves and drawers for a number of years and only keeping things that I use reasonably regularly. When I feel the need for a sort-out I can be quite ruthless and this time, it included my hundreds and hundreds of CD's. I spent a day checking through everything and ensuring that the files were duplicated on Hard Drives and during this, I was quite surprised to see a number of images where only half of the image was readable and a similar number where the whole image wasn't readable. There was no logic to which images were affected, there wasn't a sequence of images and generally they were hundreds, possibly thousands of images apart. Thankfully, I duplicated my image storage over at least two CD's and I even used two different makes of CD ............ just in case!
I thought I was being a little paranoid at the time, but as it turned out, any of my corrupted images were not corrupt on the second CD. Many of these images go back to 2003 and possibly earlier. I wonder how much longer they would have survived? Certainly not the "Forever" originally envisaged!
Now that my new "Study" is finished, I am going through years of accumulated stuff that has been filling up shelves and drawers for a number of years and only keeping things that I use reasonably regularly. When I feel the need for a sort-out I can be quite ruthless and this time, it included my hundreds and hundreds of CD's. I spent a day checking through everything and ensuring that the files were duplicated on Hard Drives and during this, I was quite surprised to see a number of images where only half of the image was readable and a similar number where the whole image wasn't readable. There was no logic to which images were affected, there wasn't a sequence of images and generally they were hundreds, possibly thousands of images apart. Thankfully, I duplicated my image storage over at least two CD's and I even used two different makes of CD ............ just in case!
I thought I was being a little paranoid at the time, but as it turned out, any of my corrupted images were not corrupt on the second CD. Many of these images go back to 2003 and possibly earlier. I wonder how much longer they would have survived? Certainly not the "Forever" originally envisaged!
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