One more question

[maggie]

I am currently downloading my pics to my computer harddrive. What is the preferred method for long term storage and avoiding the possibility of a HD meltdown? Zips? CDs?

Thanks,

Mag

[Mark Zarn]

Maggie,
Here's an interesting article that may help you sort it out:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/hd-back.htm


Mark

[Rustle]

Interesting article, Mark. It makes some very good points.

Maggie, everyone worries about hard drive failure, but the simple case is that any digital medium can fail. With this in mind, your safest bet may be to get a good photo printer and make prints of everything that you don't want to chance losing. Of course, that gets expensive over time and somewhat defeats the purpose of a digital camera.

Like the article says, CDs will fail with age, and every form of media and file format may become obsolete in the near or distant future. But in truth, that's the case with everything. jpeg files might become obsolete when we have so much fast storage that tiff files are the norm. In that sense, there's no point worrying about the future--we'd always be wondering what's next. In my opinion, it's better to use the best technology we have now and worry about transferring your files later if it becomes necessary. And maybe it won't become necessary--a lot of people are still backing up on tape drives that are a decade old, because they still work.

Firewire is great if you have a firewire card and other firewire devices, but that's not the case for most PC users. Moreover, if you open up a firewire drive, you'll find the same thing that sits inside your computer--an IDE hard drive.

So, in the end the safest/cheapest bet is to get yourself a second hard drive and dedicate it entirely to storage. If you keep your pics on both drives, there are good odds that your files will be safe. If you're really paranoid about file storage, you can build a RAID setup that will use a second drive to 'shadow' your first one. If the first fails, you just switch to the second drive. That can get a bit expensive, though.

Oh, about your privacy question. I don't know of any way to protect or password-lock your files in ZB. You'll probably want to copy them to a folder somewhere else on the computer, then delete them from the ZB database.

Russ

[maggie]

Thanks. Good article, answered my questions to the extent possible.