dennismathias

Well, you never know. I scan in everything I can get my hands on. I came into some slides made by my aunt and uncle when they were stationed in Japan. They were involved in writing the new Japanese constitution at McArthur's headquarters. They look like beauty shots. Buildings, etc. But looking closely you can see these are War Ministry Apartments. They spent years there. Sometimes you don't know the value of a photo until years..maybe generations later. So I say scan scan scan. Storage is getting cheaper all the time. And flipping through photos on line is more pleasant than holding a photo in your hand and degrading it. Photos fade. Digital scans don't.

I scan in at 600dpi (for prints) and 16bit depth. 4800 dpi at least for slides at 48bit depth. I send these up to a local internal hard drive. Cataloging is complicated but metadata is important and that's where Lightroom comes in. That's another subject. Then I use two different online backup services: Blaze and iDrive. These automatically back up the images without degradation to both the cloud and an external hard drive that is local. Then I edit these files in Lightroom and store the catalog with the scanned photos. So now I have the original scans in three different places. I have about 2 TB worth of family photos and slides. If the on line companies go bankrupt..I have my local copies. All the copies are identical with versioning so if something really weird happens I can back up a few weeks. If Lightroom blows up I have the catalog at least in multiple places. If my drive dies, I have on line storage and a local backup. All Backups happen late at night and in one case are continuous in the background. I used to use DVDs, maybe 10 years ago. Too complicated and they degrade over time.