If you are lying there, comfortable in the knowledge that all of your digital life is safely tucked away on your hard drive, in it’s little folder, juts waiting for you to access it, it’s time to WAKE UP!
OK, sure, you have an external hard drive back up with ALL of your photos and movies duplicated. Or 2.
Right?
Maybe if you have your photos on multiple computers you have a plan where you back them all up monthly onto one hard drive so that, just in case you have to leave the premises, you grab the one HD and get safe.
Right?
Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but you should do more.
Back it all up onto hard media. Not spinning hard drives, alone. We’re talking about DVD’s.
You see with Hard Drives, it’s not a matter of if they will fail, it’s when. No chicken little mentality here, but been there, and unfortunately, done that. Learned the hard way. Here’s just one article on the subject from a report by Carnegie Mellon.
And not the one where you get 1000 for $20. I wish that was the case. I have some of those that not that many years later, start to denigrate and drop stuff.
You need archival DVD’s. Rated for 100 years. Gold plated.
The ones I like are from Delkin.
Its a simple process. When you gather enough stuff to fill a 4.7 gb disc. Tag it and bag it. Burn it and store it.
And here is the other part of that equation: when you write on the disc so you know what it is (date/subject/title/etc..)
DO NOT USE A SHARPIE!!!
Tempting, I know, you have a few right there in front of you.
The chemical in the ink will destroy the disc eventually.
Use a special marking pen made to write on discs.
The next part is to store the discs in a special non corrosive sleeve, in a proper binder or storage box. This is another place that I’ve learned a lesson: went to Staples and bought the humongous box of plastic DVD cases, but the corrosive fumes given off by the plastic defeated the entire purpose of an archival disc.
Yet another brick in the wall. but there you have it . What are your images worth to you?
We’re going to help get you started on this though, with this weeks giveaway.

With a set of 16 Archival DVD’s, a binder with pages that can hold 40 discs, AND yes, the special markers to write on them, all made by Delkin.
The details on winning this package will be in this weeks NEWSLETTER sent to subscribers on Weds. @ 9:00 AM PST.
The 65th reply to the email will be the recipient.
And yes—–WE SHIP ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!!!

Special Note! If you would like to go ahead and just order some of these discs, Delkin is giving our readers a 15% discount on all Archival Gold products. just use the code ” AGINDUCED ” when asked for the coupon code online.

For those who are curious, we are exploring the Blu-Ray solution to this workflow, since you can store 5 times as much data on one disc, but the prices are still a bit high for the discs themselves ( $10 vs $25 for comparable storage). However, we do know that the Blu-Ray players are backwards compatible so will always play DVD’s.

Last note: the giveaway last week asked for the ISO of TRI-X as the answer to the question. Since 220 film is 320 and 35mm is 400, we accepted both.
Winner will be posted later today.