Is blu ray the way to go yet?

[craig_big]

Marginal dollars in the bank account? You really must have a money tree. You and Garrison act as if it is borderline negligent to "only" have multiple copies of everything stored on multiple hard drives in multiple locations. In reality, I know I am quite covered for any conceivable emergency for the near-to-distant future. And to me, my images have a cost, and a value. They are only worth so much. Beyond a certain point, it is no longer financially prudent to pile on additional protection. For example, if I only stand to gain, say, $1000 in future use through maintaining my archives, considering time and money spent, it is not worthwhile to invest more than maybe 10% of that amount in protecting them, say $100. Even that is generous. You have to weigh the likelihood of disaster against the cost of protection. This is the business of insurance. If it costs me more to protect my assets than the assets are worth, then I would be a fool. It's very possible that you and Garrison both fall into the category that I would call "infrequent, and low-capacity applications", in which case it makes perfect sense for you both to use optical media as a tertiary backup. It's easily affordable within the constrains of your needs. Personally, my needs are MUCH vaster. When I say I would need to invest in 30 BD-R's, I mean just to get started. That only covers the first 750 GB. That only covers my current critical digital photo library. That doesn't get into my obscure archives, or my edited copies, PSDs, and terabytes of other stuff. That costs $500 in digital media, plus the cost of the burner. That's in addition to my current system using 3 hard drives in 2 locations, a system carrying a total investment of less than $400, and also protects alot more data, and requires hardly any of my valuable time to maintain. See, the BD-R system doesn't nullify the hard drive system. It's "in addition to". It's stacks of paranoia on top of a perfectly good, working, safe system. It more than triples my cost. It offers no extra protection. It makes no sense on a large scale. Please, if you're working on a small scale, accept my concession that it's probably not costing you too much extra money yet. But no, BD-R is not cheap or fast enough to work effectively on large projects. Don't try to imply that photographers who are effectively backing up their work across hard drive arrays but are not using optical discs don't care about photography or their imagery. That's just rude. I DO care about my photography. Quite a great deal, in fact. My security is rock-solid, as long as I am alive to protect my library. When I die, someone else will have to take the care to replicate my archives as necessary, but they will never be wiped out by natural disaster.

[garrison_k.]

<p><em>It's quite simple: I've been there, done that, learned my lessons, accepted the truth, and moved on.</em></p>

<p>Well there you go, Craig. I should be taking your advice becasue...? Yet there is no possible way you can be burned by data loss if you back-up the way Jeff and I are trying to express and have your media on both hdd and optical disk.</p>

<p>There's plenty on New Orleans that wished they could have just rinsed off their dvd's after they were allowed back into thier homes. Instead, most removed moldy and dead hdd's out of their computers with years of data gone.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>Lol, i know what you mean ;)</p>

<p>It's tough to "go" optical if you haven't already started and kept on top of it. Otherwise it's easy if you just burn disks as you create data and stay disciplined. Something I gather you might lack :)</p>

<p>I never delete a cf card and shoot over it until it's on dvd. When I'm done and the job, and it is signed off, two more copies are burned as finals. One copy for disaster, one for the office. Then once a week, I clone my drives and send them over to my disaster recovery disks.</p>

<p>I've had hdd's go south and corrupted disks. But never both at the same time.</p>

[howard_owen]

<p>Blu ray will likely be eclipsed by holographic storage before it ever gains the market penetration that DVD enjoys now.</p>

<p>FWIW, I shoot only on 4GB CF cards and, as soon as I get back from a session I burn the cards to DVD. The files then eventually get backed up to two separate HDs.</p>

<p>I'd say it's a good bet that my civil war era tin types will outlast my digital stuff. At least when my great, great grand kids find the tin types, they'll know what they're looking at.</p>

[andre_noble5]

<p>Oh boy. All this complexity to accomplish something film achieves effortlessly. Someone tell me again, why is it we are we capturing images with a digital sensor?</p>

[dmanthree]

<p>Andre,<br>

I assume you're kidding about using film, which has an "expiration date", unlike digital, which can be copied perfectly for many, many generations. With film, you have a single copy of either a chrome or a neg. After that, each successive copy is worse due to generational losses. The advantage of digital, and I'm only talking about storage here, is that you can keep multiple perfect copies in multiple locations. Here's what I do:</p>

<ul>

<li>First copy stored on mirrored hard drives</li>

<li>Second copy on Blu Ray optical discs. The opticals are checked and eventually replace with new copies every few years. This is the reality of optical, but isn't so bad since it takes far fewer opticals now than it did in prior years.</li>

<li>Third copy stored off site via a commercial backup service (ie: Carbonite).</li>

</ul>

<p>So if I lose all three copies simultaneously, well, then I'm the unluckiest person on the planet. But film? One flood and it's over.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>David, try not to fee the trolls.</p>

[mariosforsos]

<p>"Mozy is owned by EMC, a Fortune 500 company. So I wouldn't worry that they'll go out of business!"</p>

<p>You don't actually believe that, do you? It happens all the time. They may be sold off, spinned off, closed down - even the parent company may fold...it's not as if that never happened before or won't happen again.</p>

<p>I agree it may not be AS likely as, for example, some local company, but enought "NOT to worry"? No, not really...</p>

[marc_felber1]

<p>Stay away from Mozy, their system is slow and freezes got no where with them, lucky I only signed up for a month. Is better to back up on your own. Until Carbonite comes out with external options, back up external hard drives is the way to go as well as blu ray. </p>

[bill_tuthill]

Marc, what do you mean "external options" for Carbonite?

[bill_tuthill]

Oh, maybe you mean that Carbonite fails to back up external drives. Also it costs more than I expected, considering you can email bazillions of photos to your gmail account for free.

[marc_felber1]

<p>I mean Carbonite does not have the option yet of backing up your external drives. But who has time to email raw files all day long, takes longer. </p>