Thanks for your comments!

I remember your name (from your email address) but I can’t remember for the life of me where I know you from… AMP/GIO/Suncorp? Let me know…

As food for thought, there are a couple of points I’d offer as alternative opinions:

1) CDs & DVDs while being lower in storage capacity, have the benefits of being relatively inexpensive for most households and are “write once” media – once a file is written/backed up to CD/DVD you can’t delete it by accident, nor will it corrupt due to software reasons.

Being the resident IT help guy for my immediate & extended family, I often find the simplest, most fool-proof solution is a CD/DVD for this reason. (Files on hard disks have that unique ability of being deleted/moved/formatted mysteriously by gremlins… “It was there yesterday!”… etc)

Of course CD/DVD discs may over time deteriorate or de-laminate and become unreadable (a concern that occasionally keeps me up at night with our archives) but I recommend mitigating against this by using only the highest quality discs (Taiyo Yuden from Japan) and keeping at least two copies of all originals and archives in separate locations from each other.

Our studio’s long term idea is to move everything to an offsite/web-based one-way backup service (e.g. Amazon S3) where we trickle upload our files each night/week knowing that they can’t be touched and are protected by a commercial-grade data centre with backups/redundancy/etc.

2) Hard-disks have moving parts that are more prone to failure over time as a result. I’ve had first-hand experience with external hard disks that simply drop files without a trace for no good reason, as have some of my photographer colleagues… they have had entire RAID systems fail and have had to rely on DVD backups to restore a client’s wedding images.

Regardless of CD/DVD/Hard disk you’re spot on with keeping multiple copies though, and I definitely agree with the suggestion of keeping an offsite copy somewhere. There are loads of free photo gallery websites now that offer enough space to effectively work as offsite backup/storage for most family digital photo collections.

3) Shooting RAW vs JPG is a bit of an “old chestnut” debate among professional photographers. I agree that shooting RAW gives the highest quality and the best long term ability to “interpret” files in the same was as interpreting film negatives in years to come, etc.

However, shooting RAW always requires more work/effort to convert into a more friendly, usable format (i.e. JPG or TIF). Also, the extra storage required shooting RAW and associated management/time overhead compared with JPG is often out of reach for many households and a good deal of professional, successful studios.

In our case as a professional studio, the short- & long-term storage, file management and time overhead issues becomes even more pronounced when a studio shoots 1500-2000 images per wedding x 30 per year, 200-300 images per portrait x 200 per year, and has a number of photographers duplicating this.

With a file-size ratio of around 5:1 (RAW:JPG) it’s often impractical or an unsuitable business proposition to shoot RAW, even despite the apparent quality benefits.

On another separate topic, shooting JPG only has trained me to be a much better photographer than I was shooting RAW with the “oh, I’ll fix it up later” attitude that came along with it. It’s like shooting slide/transparency film. The photograph must be as close to perfect in-camera, because the ability to “fix it up later” is severely reduced… hence forcing each photographer to take more care with the initial capture.

4) This household tip was always intended for the majority of low-tech households that might want a simple way of backing up their images for posterity’s sake. I agree with all of your points if you have the technical expertise, time, and budget to make them work! I’ll leave it at that and let our readers make their own decisions.

Thanks for opening up the debate a little!

Best regards,
Israel.