Convert to DNG in Lightroom? Or keep the CR2?

I've decided to stay with CR2. My reasoning is that should no software program support the CR2 from my camera (currently a Rebel T3), I'd expect there to be some sort of announcement (i.e. Lightroom CC2020 will no longer support raw files from the following cameras...) which would then give me time to convert those CR2 files to DNG.

I keep both files. For my workflow, I convert and copy to DNG files to a separate folder structure used by Lightroom. After my import to Lightroom, I backup/ archive my CR2 files to my NAS. Storage is cheap enough to have both.

monty87 wrote in post #17585458
I keep both files. For my workflow, I convert and copy to DNG files to a separate folder structure used by Lightroom. After my import to Lightroom, I backup/ archive my CR2 files to my NAS. Storage is cheap enough to have both.

Anyone know just how big are DNG files and CR2 files from the new 51Mpixel Canons? I'm trying to get a handle on just where all these disk drives are gonna go in my office!

[edit: I just found the preview for the 51Mpixel Canon, at ISO 12800 the RAW file is a mere 83MByte. about 160MB per shot for both DNG and CR2, or about 6500 shots per Terabyte. One shot in both formats burns up storage 12x faster than a single 40D RAW. ]

BUT..... If photos are good enough to be saved, they should be saved twice (at least). Working copy and backup. They can be two CR2s, two DNGs or one of each. The only answer is that just like you need to buy a more powerful computer every time you buy a new camera, you also need to get a bigger office.

Actually seeing that over the last fifty years, Moore's Law seems to have pretty much applied to physical volume as well as processing power. I think over that fifty years that it has actually been that the volume has shrunk significantly, while the storage capacity has gone up exponentially. This is good, as now instead of all those shelves you used to have 12" and 5 1/4" floppies on, for all of your programs, can have your collection of 4TB external disks for you back up purposes. hopefully without making the office any bigger. At least digital allows for backup, not something that was very easy back in the film days. I've said this before, but I lost all of my old film images when my flat got flooded.

Alan

Elie, to answer your point about working copy and backup...
My feeling is that CR2 is the 'archival' format (it is as the camera made it) rather than DNG, to me DNG is an intermediate form of the CR2's eventual conversion to TIFF/JPG. So I would really want two copies of CR2 for archival data security, then one copy of the DNG is sufficient (if you have the CR2 you can create another DNG from it). So now we're consuming 240MBytes per image to store three files!
BTW, in past playing with DNG, I have discovered that DNG versions of images are actually a bit smaller (about 10%) than the same CR2 image, so for data compaction reasons CR2+DNG is a bit less storage demanding than 2*CR2. It makes me wonder about what is 'lost' in the 10% reduction in bits stored!

BigAl007, methinks you under analyze the implications of massive photo files.
Yes, the analog to Moore's Law has seen the price of storage plummet, which is terrific (I paid $500 for a 5MByte harddrive in the mid 1980's to upgrade a dual floppy IBM PC to have a harddrive, so I appreciate $70 for 1TByte! :rolleyes
However, at some time in the future, I need to eventually MIGRATE my data from its current storage on USB 2 external harddrives to the new storage type on USB99 (or whatever exists as the fastest external connection at the time), I will need a PC which somehow has both old and new connectors supported (in spite of the fact that USB 2 will not have been on PCs for a couple decades), and I will be limited to data movement at the crawl of the USB 2 port So if I have to move 10x the data it will take 10x as long to do!

Wilt you really should be migrating your data regularly as you upgrade. As you say, not a lot of good if your backup is on now effectively unreadable hardware. Also I think that most of the mainstream hardware interfaces have been around on systems for considerable periods of time, although there are always those next big things that never actually get good traction and so swiftly fade away.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #17586535
Wilt you really should be migrating your data regularly as you upgrade. As you say, not a lot of good if your backup is on now effectively unreadable hardware. Also I think that most of the mainstream hardware interfaces have been around on systems for considerable periods of time, although there are always those next big things that never actually get good traction and so swiftly fade away.

Alan

No disagreement about being timely in data migration, I have seen far too many interfaces/ports/devic​es disappear relatively rapidly.
Tell me about how many of these are supported on new PCs today, without a hunt for add-on expansion cards?

• ST-506 harddrive
  
• ESDI harddrive
  
• SCSI harddrive
  
• 25-pin parallel port
  
• 9-pin serial port