Best memory for your memories

By now you've probably dumped your pictures off of your digital camera, and onto your hard drive. Everything from the 3rd grade Christmas musical, the kids sitting on Santa's lap, putting the cookies out for Santa, opening the presents, etc, etc — all six-hundred of them.

You certainly don't want to lose them; you want to keep them safe in the photo drawer, along with the pictures of your great-great grandfather that came over on the boat 100 years ago. But right now, they're on your hard drive, which could crash in the next minute, week, or two years from now.

You do archive these treasures somewhere safe, right?

Since most computers come with CD or DVD burners, most people — if they're doing backups at all — are backing them up onto CD-R's or DVD-R's. I also know people who've spent a small fortune transferring their old Super-8 film reels onto DVDs

Enjoy them now, because they'll likely be gone in 5 years.

In Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?, we find out that burned discs will last 2-5 years. You're best bet is magnetic tape which typically has a 30-100 year life span.

I'm sure both of those figures assume ideal storage conditions. I'm also going to suggest that you need to make sure that you're using good quality media and hardware to ensure that you're making good archive copies to start with. Years ago, I had been lured into the inexpensive (<$100) tape drive hardware offered by Iomega. We got four of them at the office. Three out of the four were either DOA, or so marginal in quality that we couldn't get a verifiable backup out of them. I swore them off. Iomega later became well known for their inexpensive Zip drives. Removable disks which you could use to backup and transport data. These earned a lot of notoriety for a mis-feature known as the Click Of Death (also here)

You get what you pay for. So perhaps you should spend good money on a tape drive (at least a few hundred dollars) and a few hundred dollars on good quality tapes. You will also need to hope that in 30-100 years that your great-great grandkids will have the technology to read that tape and to decipher what's on it. By then they'll be using some miniature compact flash cards that store Duotrigintillion bytes of data, and you will buy them in 50-packs for $15.99.

Or maybe do what I've been doing for the last 10-15 years. It's all on my hard drive. It's all backed up onto another hard drive, either on the same machine or in another machine that I have on my network at home... Or both. In three years, I'll have a new computer with a drive that's 3 times bigger than the one that I have. So I'll plug that one into my network, copy everything important to it, and then make sure that I keep that one backed up somewhere at all times.

In other words, I'm not putting anything onto disc or tape and expecting it to stick around in a drawer somewhere. I keep the data with me and it just keeps hopping from old hardware to new hardware, and I keep multiple copies on various machines. Slim chance of two or three hard drives going down at once. Have a large external hard drive so that you can keep a copy at work also.

Need a great utility to help keep your data synced or backed up in different drives and across a network? I found SyncBackSE which is a superb tool.

UPDATE: Brett Levy already covered this territory in Shelter for the storm of digital photos, in the LA Times.