I doubt I'll ever feel really secure about digital storage, certainly not in
the same way I do about the 30-plus 50-page binders full of slides dating back
to the '60s on the shelves by my desk. Even though now sticking a toe in the
digital pond, I still plan to shoot film, and if it's something I'm really
serious about, it may even be 6x9 film.
Remember all the folks who gathered up their home movies back in the '80s and
took them to the neighborhood camera store to have them transferred to video
tape? What a great idea: no projector or screen to fool with, just pop the
cassette in and watch on the telly. Wonder how many of those folks threw away
the film. Wonder how many of those video tapes are still playable. The world
is full of things to wonder about.
I, on the other hand, am able to simultaneously embarrass my daughters while
uproariously entertaining my grandchildren and sons-in-law by dragging out the
trusty old Bolex projector and a shoebox full of Super-8 Kodachrome. They even
ask to see this stuff -- the grandkids and their fathers, that is.
It's a shame that so much of the glitzy new stuff technology gives us all too
often requires that we trade security and dependability for convenience. I'm
not convinced that David McCullough doesn't have the right idea: he writes on a
'40s Underwood. And I can probably chop down a tree, at least a small to
medium one, with my 40-year-old double-bladed axe while you're getting gasoline
and fiddling with that chainsaw you haven't started in two years.
Walt, who still has a pencil sharpener screwed on the wall
--
"Anything more than 500 yards from
the car just isn't photogenic." --
Edward Weston
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Piers Hemy" <piers@xxxxxxxx>
>
> Sadly, a firend was persuaded by his son-in-law to do just that, installing
> a duplicate hard drive with mirroring software to provide the backup.
> Somehow the file allocation table on the master drive was corrupted - and
> the mirroring software did precisely what it said on the tin, duplicating
> the error on what had been the backup.
>
> Both disk are with recovery specialists as I type, trying to reconstitute
> the FAT for either disk to recover tens of GB of image data. The data are
> all, without exception, present and uncorrupted on the disk. It's just not
> obvius what sequence they should be in...
>
> But I do agree about the principle - I have a 120GB external USB disk with
> Iomega Auto Backup software running daily on my user data, and occasional
> Norton Ghost backups of the entire C: drive.
>
> --
> Piers
>
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