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Those responding here say to keep the negatives. But, why? It is harder and harder to find anyone who will print from negatives, and the costs are going up accordingly.
If you haven't printed from those negs by now, why will you in the future?
Do some of you know things I do not? I have fabulous pics from all over the U.S., but even if I printed them, then what? Pics are a dime a dozen now. Things that took real time, talent, and a good eye in the past are .... well, in the past.
I don't mean to be mean. I would really like to hear some specific reasons to keep MY negatives.
I keep negs for future scanning rather than printing.
Film negatives are basically the high def version of film based photography. Scans from negs will always trump scans from prints so in the future if you decide you want digital reproductions of your past film based work the negatives will provide the best digital image. Tech is improving at a rapid rate and even inexpensive scanners can do a decent job of scanning negs so you don't even need to send them out for scanning.
In addition they serve as a cheap physical backup of your work.
In about 54 years of photography I have never thrown a negative away... I know people who have, and have regretted it.
Poncho, I'm with you on this. I have 2 very large storage tubs filled with negatives, 1 with slides. All of my videos were put on cds but I have a very large box of videos. going back 60 years.
Now I rotate 2 hard drive2. One on my computer and the other in our safety deposit box, I rotate every month or so.
(I have photos - no negatives- that my mother took going back to the 20s -Some great images from the 1939 World's Fair taken with an old Kodak Brownie)
Now I rotate 2 hard drive2. One on my computer and the other in our safety deposit box, I rotate every month or so.
The number one reason for loss of data at least for the homeowner is drive failure, if a drive fails it's probably going to be the one in the computer so you could lose a month's worth of data. When the drive physically fails it can almost always be recovered but that is $$$ as in thousands.
Look into using a RAID1 array. With RAID1 configuration you are using both drives in the computer. They mirror each other and the health of the drives is monitored, if one fails you can just pop it out and install another drive. This will also give you a slight performance increase in read speeds since the computer can read from both drives simultaneously. That will prevent nearly all loss of data and it's seamless, once set up it's all done in the background.
That's not to say you should no continue with your off site backup, if you have a house fire or something the RAID configuration is not going to help. I'd get an external drive for that. Keep in mind backups serve two purposes and most people making backups get it wrong, one reason is for recovery of the file. The other reason is data corruption prevention and that is what they get wrong. Suppose you are writing a book on Word and are up to 800 pages and accidentally delete 400 pages in the middle. If you don't notice this and only have a single backup of that file when you overwrite the backup with a new copy now they are both corrupted.
Easiest way to prevent this is have a true archive copy on DVD or Blu Ray that cannot be overwitten. You could of course use another drive for this and in the past that is what I would have recommended but I've done a complete 180 on that becsue of recent virus. This virus would encrypt files on the drive and once it encrypted a lot of them would hold you ransom. At that point it's either pay up or kiss little Johnnies photos goodbye.
On a final note any burnable media is not reliable. The quality of the disc is the most important variable. They can fail today or it could be 20 years from now, what is absolute is they will fail.
Last edited by thecoalman; 07-26-2014 at 07:32 AM..
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