I had a hard drive fail on me once. It was a total nightmare. I lost two years of digital photos and all of my music that i’d digitized. Never again.
Thankfully this happened to me before I was a professional photographer and it was just my own images. Not a wedding client’s. If you charge people for your photography, you need to be professional and have a proper bomb-proof backup strategy.
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Could memory cards and hard drives one day store massive numbers of digital photographs on DNA rather than chips and platters? Possibly, and scientists are trying to make that happen.
Last year, we reported that a group of researchers had successfully stored 700 terabytes of data on a single gram of DNA. The data being stored that time was a book written by one of the geneticists. Now, a new research effort has succeeded in storing something that’s a bit more relevant to this blog: a photograph.
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Facebook has over 240 billion photos on its servers — that’s billion… with a “b” — and every day about 350 million more are added. Naturally, Facebook needs to store all of those photos somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be accessible at all times because who knows when Jack will need to show Jill some pics of the hill from 3 years ago. Read more…
If you’re like me, you have a bazillion photographs backed up on external hard drives, but have you ever wondered how digital photographs are stored on the magnetic surface of a platter spinning at thousands of rotations per minute? This interesting video provides a neat look at how hard drives work, though it will probably also convince you to back up your photographs by some other means as well (e.g. online or on discs). The engineering that makes hard drives possible is amazing!
External hard drives are a convenient way to store your digital photographs, but they have finite lifetimes and eventually fail. Failing drives have a number of distinctive sounds that can warn you and give you some time to start a data-exodus to a healthier hard drive. Datacent, a data recovery company, has a useful page on which you can listen to some of the most common “bad drive sounds”. These are categorized by manufacturer, and include things like stuck spindles, disk heads crashing, accessing bad sectors, and bad bearings. If your drive makes any of these sounds while your photographs are still accessible, begin evasive maneuversimmediately!
Hard drive sounds (via Boing Boing)
Image credit: Drive Destruction 11 by Nedster78
Want to have the geekiest photo-storage device amongst all your photo-loving friends? Check out this 1:18 scale replica of the DeLorean Time Machine from Back to the Future. In addition to be a super faithful clone of the “real thing”, it also doubles as a 500GB Seagate external hard drive, allowing you to grab images from the past if you ever accidentally delete them. Well… maybe not, but for $250 you get a lot more than the average, boring old hard drive.
