Saving Digital Photos to CD or DVD
Film Negatives - Storing your photos or negatives for safekeeping, i.e. archiving them, was pretty simple in the film days. Many get put into an album, but most of them in end up a shoe box and stashed in a closet or somewhere else. Pull them out every now then when family is over for some fun memories. Decades later they end up with the next generation. Pictures and negatives may be faded, but they’re still there.
Digital Files - There is no such thing as a faded digital image, it’s either there or not. If a hard drive fails it may be possible to recover files, sometimes at great expense, but that’s not a sure thing. For this reason it’s imperative that your copy your digital photos to a more stable media such as CDs or DVDs.
CD or DVD Drive - Most computers nowadays come with combination CD/DVD read/write drives built in. If you have an older computer it may only have a CD read/write drive, and if really old (as far as computers are concerned) it may have only a CD ROM drive (read only), or none at all. If that’s the case you have a few options.
- Have a CD/DVD read/write drive installed (if your computer is compatible)
- Have a USB card installed (if not already there) and get an external USB CD/DVD read/write drive
- Buy a new computer
CD or DVD Durability - Remember the fading photos and negatives? CDs and DVDs have similar issues, primarily because of chemical decomposition of the media. As the CD or DVD break down chemically over time sections will become unreadable. It’s very difficult if not impossible to reconstruct a digital image with missing bits.
Archive Grade CD and DVD - These are not your ‘50 for $9.99′ pack run of the mill CDs and DVDs. Archive grades incorporate gold (yes gold) for maximum resistance to chemical breakdown. Expected life under proper storage conditions is measured in 100s of years. This is what you want to use. Currently they cost around a couple of dollars a piece if you buy a 10 pack.
Frequency of Backups - I normally do it once a year during the Christmas holidays, as I’m typically on vacation hanging around the house. You may have another time of the year where you end up with some idle time. When you do your back-up, you should obviously back up everything since your last back up. I typically overlap previous back-ups i.e not only last year, but the year before also (which was backed up a year ago).
Final Considerations - You should avoid schemes which involve some proprietary software to ‘restore’ the files back to the computer they came from. Ten years from now you will likely neither have that computer nor that software anymore, and probably not the same operating system either. Fortunately most backup software will write a disk using a ‘plain UDF’ file format as long as you choose to ‘create a data disk’. This will assure that the files are readable in most operating systems, current and hopefully future.
