Archiving your client's wedding photos for long-term

[e._hughes]

<p>I ran across a forum earlier today discussing the loss of a wedding client's images and whether or not the photographer should replace the CD and whatnot...<br /> This got me thinking about whether photographers might want to offer an archival service to their wedding clients to back up their photos for say, 10 years for X number of dollars. Much like an extended warranty on a vehicle purchase.<br /> This could be contracted out to a reputable external company that would store the photos for you for the alloted time, and then if the client had a fire or lost the images, the company would give you access to the files (after all they are your copywritten images) and then you could reprint the album or CD or whatever you gave them in the first place.<br /> I guess it's like insurance/storage. It would save YOU the hassle of storing the client's images for long periods of time. And you don't have to worry about getting that phone call a few years from now from the client saying, "There was a fire and my photos are all gone...do you still have them?" and having to say, "nope sorry, you're out of luck..."<br /> My question is: If this kind of service was readily available, easily accessible, and affordable would you do it? And how much do you think that would be worth? $50 per client? $100? $200? etc..</p>

[jon rennie]

<p>I don't think I would ever want to charge this to my clients. Think of it from another perspective. You are basically saying you wont bother to keep proper backups of your pictures unless they pay more money to you.<br>

We all have to have a good backup system for at least the last couple years. How much extra work is it to archive even longer given todays cheap storage solutions? Not much really. You don't need to archive all the raw files, so you can fit a few years archived weddings onto a single 500gig hard drive that costs you very little and takes up almost no space. This price will continue to go down as well. Buy a nice fireproof waterproof safe and you have a nice little inhouse system. True, the best would be to also have an offsite backup but again - the costs don't really go up too much to store 100 weddings vs 500 weddings.<br>

This idea sounds more like a nickel and diming service. We are not insurance agents, so I would recommend keeping a nice backup system and charge a suitable "recovery" fee after a given amount of time if they need something pulled from the archives.</p>

[e._hughes]

<p>But how long do you plan on holding the photos in your safe/storage system? I just can't imaging keeping all the files for as long as 10 years or more. I'm talking about LONG-TERM storage. OF COURSE I keep proper back-ups of my client's photos, but for how long can we do this realistically? I wasn't suggesting that the cost has to be passed on to the clients. More suggesting that it would take some of the pressure of the photographer for the file storage, so we could focus more on being the photographer.</p>

[bob_sunley]

<p>Well a lot of photo studios kept real negatives for decades. The studio I worked in in the late 60's had no problem doing reprints of portraits and weddings taken during and prior to WWII. Every negative had a serial number and that was logged on ledger pages by date, along with the persons name and other information. Every print delivered to a customer had the negative number on it as well.</p>

<p>BTW, running a business is most of the job, if you'r lucky, photgraphy will be maybe 20% of your time.</p>

<p> </p>

[cathy_and_david_bock]

<p>We save every image onto our harddrive which duplicates to our second hard drive every evening. When they are both full we put one in a safety deposit box.</p>

[cjogo]

<p>A few years back >>I had the experience of seeing wedding negs, from as old as > 1978 , I had stored. So, our policy these days ::: we keep the files for one year >> after that ~~ out the door. We send the B&G a DVD of RAW and a CD HiRez Jpegs ....the future storage is in their hands.</p>

[e._hughes]

<p>So Bob, you're suggesting that we keep archival CD's in files like the old days? Max shelf-time for gold archival CD's is 20 years. But CD's are reliant upon computers that can read CD's. In 20 years, do you expect computers to still be reading CD's? Does your computer read floppys or Zips anymore? So, every year we would have to make sure that our back-ups are still on current media. That could get expensive and time-consuming.<br>

I'm still talking about contracting it out to a TECH company to do this for us. I still think that my time is more valuable editing photos, or being out photographing, or designing an album, or advertising, making phone calls, than messing around with figuring out how to do TECH stuff that is not a photographer's strong-suit.<br>

Think of it this way, you would be a hypocrite if you said that professional photographer's are best suited to being photographers, and then think that you (not a TECH person) is best suited to dealing with the technological aspects of keeping your files safe.<br>

I'm not trying to start an argument, I really just want to know what photographers think about this topic.</p>

[e._hughes]

<p>So far, it sounds like either you keep your client's images on CD's forever, though they might not work in a few years, or just dump them after one year. What about something in between? Like you keep them for one year, and then you could give the client the option of LONG-TERM storage. I know most newlyweds are not going to take the time to back up the CD's you give them. </p>

[jon rennie]

<p>I plan on keeping a backup of every wedding I ever shoot for life. I already backup everything, so it's just a matter of storing the drives as they fill up.<br /> If you are backing up you are already doing the work, so how much pressure is it to just store them in a small area. If you look into off-site backup solutions, it would be a lot of money over 10, even 20 years. Who knows if those companies will be in business at the time or how much it will cost you.<br /> Assuming you keep an archive of Jpegs not RAW (which is all a client is worried about) then you can put upto 100 weddings on a 500gig drive. These drives are also increasing in storage capacity and prices are cheap, so even 200 weddings on a 1TB drive (numbers are rough to make it easy). If you shoot 50 weddings a year (which is a lot in my opinion) you can put 4 years on one drive (at current technology). You could easily fit even 10 drives in a small $200 fire/waterproof safe. 40 years of images!<br /> At todays prices, that's only $1000 in drives ($25/year).<br>

Hard drives last longer then CD's especially if not in use. If they do malfunction there are many recovery services out there that can restore data with great success. Not possible on CD or DVDs.</p>

[Ian Taylor]

<p>I know a photographer who offers to archive for $75/year. A surprising number of couples take the option. He burns a disk, files it, and charges their card annually.</p>

[plavchak]

<p>I think people are missing the big picture, if you will, here. Things are changing very fast. I do believe CD/DVDs will be around for a while, however I think within 20 yrs they will be like cassetts or 8 tracks. You may still be able to locate an old mac or pc that someone restored that might be able to pull up the files, but they will be few. Unlike photo negatives from 100 yrs ago that can still be printed today. I don't think anyone has really come up with a 100% long term (80-100 yrs) way to save digital files. Or, maybe they have. Maybe todays DVDs will still be good in 100yrs and the files just as good as when they were burned. We don't know for sure since they have not been around long. Plus the process of making them is getting better, so who knows. Hard drives have the same issues. You would think they would last longer then a DVD, but how do you know? How much would a HD degrade over time stored in a safe with no real climate control? I believe within 10yrs storage will be to the point that you'll be able to store a whole wedding of raw + jpegs on a CF size card maybe even a micro SD card....but will your great-great grand kids be able to access it's files??</p>

[jon rennie]

<p>Mike, the big difference with DVD vs hard drive is ease of changing formats. If a better technology comes out you would like to transfer your drives to, you only have to copy a couple devices and not hundreds of DVDs. Takes no time at all to bring it up to speed when the time is needed.<br>

DVD and CD's are more fragile then many think. Everyone is worries about scratching the bottom of disks, but its actually the top side of the disks that hold the data (right under the top label area). Damage the top area of your DVD and the data is gone. Damage the bottom area and you can normally fix it.<br>

Will your great great grand kids be able to access the files? Why not? - but that doesn't really matter in this business. IDE hard drives are 20 years old, and they are just being phased out now (but still in wide use and will be for a while longer). It will be a few more years before that technology becomes rare. I won't go into all the techno babble. Bottom line is it will be simple in 10 years time if you saw a change in technology to simply copy and paste the drives over to something new.<br>

Oh, and hard drives aren't really prone to issues with climate control. Assuming you keep them where you live its more then enough. The data is completely sealed from the elements. The controller boards on the outside are subject to it but they are pcb boards and are rugged. They are built to handler 100+ degree heat as well as freezing conditions.<br>

PS: this is coming from a former tech guy.</p>

[neilambrose]

<p>This service is readily available now to anyone. There are many third-party sites that do exactly this - clients can simply purchase the storage space they need and upload the files. The files remain accessible all the time, and are also archived and managed for long-term disaster recovery.</p>

<p>These services are cheap, plentiful and robust. I don't think there's much mileage in offering something similar to clients when they can get something better (and undoubtedly cheaper) from a specialist data storage service, with far more sophisticated levels of service and assurance than any single photographer could provide.</p>

[aimee_pieters]

<p>I've kept the same system with digital that I started with film many years ago. We keep them for 3 calendar years, then we offer them for sale. So this past January, we contacted all of our weddings from 2006. <br>

We've always sold them for a minimal amount because we want to get a decision right away and we want to either sell them or destroy them. Occasionally we get some resistance beacause some feel the "own" them, but for the most part we don't. <br>

Also, once 2-3 years have passed, we actually profit more from the sales than we would from reprint sales. We feel we have a moral obligation to get a yes or no answer from our clients. Early in business we had decided on 5 years, but found that it becomes increasingly more difficult to contact them as time goes on....-Aimee</p>

[peter_wang6]

<p>Here's the problem. What happens if, after charging clients for this backup service, you lose the data? Then what?</p>

<p>I don't think the responses so far have really taken into account the issues regarding the professional liability of being paid for a perpetual service. Data archival and preservation is not a trivial task. It's not so cut-and-dried as just putting it on an external drive or DVD and forgetting about it. If the National Archives has to deal with the problem of trying to read data off obsolete media, what makes any of us think that we can do better? As image sizes and recording detail increases, we'll be dealing with ever-increasing amounts of data storage. Already people are wrestling with how to store 1080p video. Physical media is no more immune--some of the only copies of film reels of classic movies are deteriorating rapidly despite being literally kept frozen for decades.</p>

<p>Some of you might think that we'd never be expected to preserve data for centuries. But those clients you're taking photos of today will have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It may become their responsibility to archive the memories you've so uniquely captured. But the convenience of digital data brings with it the increased expectation that more and more of that data should be available for retrieval. It's a double-edged sword. So, while by all means we should all do our best to archive our data, I'm hesitant to make the promise that it will always be there, whether or not one is charging for that promise.</p>

<p>Somewhat jokingly, perhaps the easiest way to archive data (especially if it has notoriety or is of particular interest), is to simply upload it on the internet. Some of that stuff seems like it will never die....</p>

[chris_whitcomb1]

<p>Peter - Bravo sir, you just identified the elephant in the room that no one wants to admit is there, we are no more archival experts than brain surgeons. I for one like Aimee's way of handling it and will be implementing that into our business plan.</p>

[betty_lowrey]

<p>I archive my client's albums on 2 backup discs in a locked box for an unlimited time, I'm not sure how long I'd hang on to them but I have them just in case.</p>

[mark_t5]

<p>I see that a lot of you guys talk about saving pictures in multiple discs and store them to avoid single point of failure, and then tell the clients that their pictures are safe because of so. But how many of you guys truly have the data in separate physical locations?<br>

What happens if your house goes up in flames? All those separate discs will burn at the same time. What do you tell your clients? Oops?</p>

[w_vh]

<p>I like your idea and plenty of companies provide back ups. <br>

www.zenfolio.com backs up the images. The problem is, how do you avoid liability in the event that zenfolio has their triple back up system go down? <br>

Save $5 on a year membership and give me a savings of $5: coupon code: 6Z9-JG4-W2M</p>

[Marcus Ian]

<p>My solution is mirrored HDDs (currently I run 2 mirrored 1tb drives), with a DVD (archival quality disc... supposedly good for 100-300yrs, all I know is I've gone through hundreds of these and NEVER had a failure) for every client. And then I also have hosting online w/ unlimited storage/ . </p>

<p>The chance of ALL these failing simultaneously (or before I could re back them up) is less then that of lightning striking me, while my plane is crashing (no, not literally). I contract a 1 + 3yr storage plan, so while I don't guarantee anything after that, my plan is to keep everything forever. I don't think there is any reason not to. </p>

<p>My opinion is that in the near future this will become a professional liability issue for our industry. Most photographers issue their work on 'standard' DVD/CD-Rs - these have an unacceptably high percentage of failure, and an extremely short lifespan. Where this becomes a liability is if you charge for a backup disc, restrict (as is your right, and which MANY photographers do) backup/copies/reproduction rights. and then it fails.<br>

If I bought my pictures from Aimee 3yrs after my ceremony, she destroyed her backups, and the disc failed (after I respected her copyrights). I would have a legitimate civil damages case. Regardless of her/my contract, it would should gross negligence in her care/ lack of care of my priceless/ireplaceable images. That is one of the key reasons I use Archival grade DVDrs and DO NOT restrict reproduction/ backups when I sell digital negatives... Essentially I have done EVERYTHING reasonably possible to ensure they have the right & capability to retain this data PERPETUALLY.</p>

[Marcus Ian]

<p>I forgot to mention....as it relates to the obsolescence of the optical drive...<br>

regardless of the customer's ability to access the data on an archive disc, as long as the data is useable, somebody or some service will always be able to recover it. Essentially, even though the <em>consumer </em> may not be able to directly access the data, it will still be retrievable.<br>

One could even say that these discs will become the equivelant of true film negatives which in and of themselves are useless to a consumer, but can take them down to walgreens and have prints made... Of course the disc has to still be good...</p>

[kiva]

<p>~I give the couple an archival DVD disc with instructions to back them up right away and keep the master disc. Then, I suggest that they back up the master disc every two years. </p>

<p>~I tell them I'll make every attempt to have a copy of their image files for one year only. </p>

<p>~I am not in charge of storage and I teach them how to back up there final product and suggest multiple copies and place them in different (safe) locations.</p>

<p>Of course I do my very best to have an external hard drive back up as well as a back up copy on a high quality DVD disc ... but, I want the family to take charge of the prodcut they bought and make them responsible since I'm not in the storage business.</p>

[mihael_tominsek]

<p>OMG how wrong are some of commenters:<br>

"Hard drives last longer then CD's especially if not in use." << this statement couldn't be far from the truth. Well stored CD's are good for decades. Hard drives when not working a year could loose data.<br>

Not to mention that hard drives are workse and worse in quality and good hard drives are more and more expensive. And that images are getting bigger and bigger. So 500GB (in 2015) could be just ONE wedding.<br>

I have hard drive that are 18 month old and having a 130 hours of running and already have bad sectors AND corupted data on it. Not to mention that especially JPEGs are prone to coruption. So double that 500GB for one wedding, because if not having AT LEAST TWO HDD's, that means not having archived at all. To do it properly, another medium must be used: DVD's or BD's. That mean good amount of time for every wedding dedicated for making proper archive.<br>

But every photographer want to do proper backup BEFORE do enything with the files. So RAW will be backed up for shure. And do not make mistake to back up only reduced JPEGS. Not to mention ruining the fidelity with tools called "jpeg-mini". RAW holds all the data it was captured and save that. You can always go back and redo the editing, or more likely in 20 years resolving even better image quality from existing RAW file (I use Adobe Lightroom and there is huge progres from version 1 to curent CC, in image quality, so I often reprocess old images). In analog way - studios were saving negatives, not developed prints!<br>

But again: Saving negatives mean you put them in safe place and you're good for 500+ years. Maybe quality of emulsion will deteriorate, but you ALWAYS have something. In digital you either have it or not! That mean working on your archives in regular basis. Udatimg the media where images are saved, reading all the files and testing them (!!), making backups of backups and replacing faulty media, when you find out it's broken. Do not say you never had image on computer which looked fine, but it opened blank.<br>

So maintaining digital archive is several times more expensive and time consuming than analog one.<br>

LONG TERM archiving is not just one time cost of money and time. Every photographer must dedicate some budget for archiving, anyway. But having everything forever, that piles up endlessly. Somewhere MUST be the end of archivig.<br>

And I am videographer. I record in professional formats (DNxHD, CINEFORM), which takes 1TB per hour. And I do it with several cameras. In the miniDV and HDV time cheap sony-premium tape was perfect storage. 20+ year retention and $2 tape holded 1 hour of video. Finished wedding video stored on 1-2 tapes + DVD. Now one finished wedding wideo takes $50 for reliable archiving (250 GB Cineform, 2x HDD, cost per GB taken). And we want to bake it to BD's too. So 10 BD's takes another $10 and FIVE HOURS to bake them. Storing all that take a SHOE BOX of space - compared to a cigarette box for 2 DV tapes.<br>

So how long a VIDEOGRAPHER should keep his work, or better how much of his time and money he should INVEST in other people?<br>

*****<br>

Than one mentioned that having archives on HDD is easy to transfer: "Takes no time at all to bring it up to speed when the time is needed". YES, having ONE hard drive and want ONE image; that is fast. But try to copy 2TB drive over USB 3.0 today. It will take 6 hours!! Imagine to copy yesterdays USB2.0 drive of same capacity... it will take a day. And todays HDD's will be always same speed. You can pull 5 year old 320GB HDD from old USB2.0 enclosure, but the drive itself was 60MB/s at most at that time (consider that external drives are the slowest/oldest/worst tech a manufacturer can offer, that is the reason they are cheaper than internal drives). And that old drive will stil take 90 minutes to copy. And you have 36 external hard drives and similar number of internal - like I do. COPY THAT in "no time" if you can. Sure, it's faster than DVD's.</p>

[mihael_tominsek]

<p>My way doing it is:<br />When we do contract we agree what are deliverables. Mostly DVD for video and photos on DVD or photobook. At delivery I offer them RAW material. Some takes them some not. I always stress out the importance of backup and I ensure tham I WILL have proper backup for a month. When I plan to delete that and reduce backup to ONE hard drive, I contact them again. I contact them 2-3 times before I delete anything. Than I tell that I have backup with no guarantee. But I want to offer them having backup in long therm, because right now u have 30TB of backups alredy!! This is where I am not sure how exactly do it, so I ended on this old thread.<br>

My thinking is:<br />Cherge per GB per month (once per year, or monthly). Data would be on two separate NAS towers. Data integrity will be checked as it should be. Plan A will be "backup", plan B will be "archive". A will cover data on two NAS and refund of fee, if we mees up. Plan B would be third backup somewhere (on something), and special care. With this more expensive plan I will contract a compensation amont if we mess up. And we will possibly have bavk insurance of some how too.</p>

[shawn_mertz]

<p>There is a company that offers this service for ten years, for one time fee of $ 30 to photographers. </p>