Although one can buy CD ROM disks that will (at least in theory) last hundreds
of years, it strikes me that if one has much of a library, periodically copying
old disks to new formats to preserve compatibility with future recording
formats causes great logistics problems.
The issue isn't restricted to photos. I need to save everything, basically.
My approach is bulk storage, so that conversion to a new format takes one
operation, not hundreds to thousands of manual operations. Nor is any thought
required, which is good, as I now have 12 GBytes of files in 103,000 files and
folders, some 18 years accumulation. It may sound like a lot, but it all fits
on one or two tapes, costing ten or twenty dollars.
I buy large hard disks, and back them up on tape, doing a traditional
three-tape or five-tape cycle, so it would take destruction or unreadability of
either 2 or 4 tapes to cause loss.
Every 3 to 5 years, I buy a new computer, and this computer comes with a disk
at least four times larger than the prior disk, so I restore the entire disk
from the prior system onto a corner of the new disk. I've been doing this for
years, and you will find a trail of restored disk images, each containing the
image of the prior disk, going back to 1985 or so. (My first personal computer
was a Mac SE. I had use of $100,000 minicomputers in the 1970s, with real tape
drives, and if one didn't do a three-tape cycle, soon one lost everything.
Back then, $100,000 bought a nice house.)
Every so often, I buy a new tape drive because the old drive is too slow and
too small to be adequate for backing the current disk up. Because the old disk
files are on the new disk, backing it up on the new drive gets all the old
files on the new tape. I also keep the now almost worthless old tape drive,
and of course the backup tapes it wrote. I don't know how long they will last,
but I've yet to find a tape I cannot read. Though I did have a drive fail.
Replacing the drive was cheaper than fixing it.
I've been using external 4mm DAT tapes and drives, and the newer tape drives
can read and write the older DAT formats (DDS x, where x varies from 1 to 4;
the 1 was silent). These tape drives have cost $600 to $800, and the tapes
have been $10 to $20 apiece. My favorite backup program is Dantz Retrospect,
which can often be gotten bundled with the tape drive. I used to get my drives
from APS Tech (www.apstech.com), but they seem to have dropped DAT drives; I
don't know why.
Reports are that 4mm DAT may be at the end of its road, with the DDS4 tape
format being the last of the line. However, DDS3 and DDS4 drives are widely
manufactured, and will be around for some time, and prices will likely fall.
The most intersting new alternative is VXA (www.vxa.com), endorsed by Apple and
Compaq and others, but the difficulty is that at present there is exactly one
manufacturer. An interesting report appears at
<http://www.4benchmark.com/uploads/inthenews/lowcostdrives.pdf>.
Joe Gwinn
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