The Digital Shoebox
By Jonas DeMuro
LD Writer The pictures of my childhood are in envelopes, and there are piles and piles of them. There are so many of them, that most have never found their way to any album. Baby pictures, toddler Christmases, family vacations, and gatherings comprise but a few themes of the photos; and they are all priceless to me and my family. However, they have yet to be assembled into something organized as it is too overwhelming a project. It's the kind of thing we put off for a rainy day, and then ignore on that rainy Sunday to watch the new classics on TNT. 
Enter the digital revolution. Digital cameras are now common worldwide, surpassing film camera sales, and our new memories are being stored digitally. The majority of the pictures I take go from the camera, to the compact flash memory card, and finally to the "My Pictures" folder on my hard drive. Only a handful of pictures ever get printed. Every three megapixel picture is a 500 kilobyte jpeg file stored in a dated folder. And with the unlimited "free film" effect of digital cameras, I now take and save more pictures than ever!
I used to take one or at most two rolls of 35 mm film on a vacation. Each shot was carefully framed, metered and chosen. Now I often take pictures of everything, limited more by battery life than by memory or cellulose. On my last trip I took over 230 pictures, as well as several Quicktime movies. Battery life is even less of an issue lately, now that I started using the e2 disposable lithium ion batteries from Energizer to power the camera with their long lasting life.
With digital technology, we are able to organize and utilize our files in increasingly complex ways. For example, going through the envelopes to find all the pictures that were taken in mid-May may take while, but can be done with ease through the computer. As an aside, Picasa 2, a free download from the Google website, is truly excellent for organizing your hard drive full of pictures.
Let's face it; we have all become digital packrats over the last few years. We keep all of our digital pictures, music files and now even our videos on computer hard drives. Of course, the hard drive is so large on newer systems that we never seem to fill it up anyway. The hard drive is "the digital shoebox" of the new millennium.
On my first computer that I purchased in 1997 had a 1.6 gigabyte hard drive (editor's note: Wow! I remember my first 20 megabyte hard drive, which was almost the size of a shoebox!). The computer that I built last year has a 160 gigabyte hard drive. The hard drive grew by a factor of 100 over 6 short years! Storage growth has far outpaced even the very rapid growth of processing power. Of course, the 160 gigabyte drive made sense at the time as it was just a few dollars more than the smaller drives. New notebook PCs are commonly equipped with 80 and even 100 gigabytes, which seem small as 300 gigabyte drives are becoming common and affordable.
For this article, I took stock of the number of files I have stored. In the three years that I have owned a digital camera, I have taken over 4000 pictures (not to mention the approximately1000 music files and the 100 video clips). All told this is over 11 gigabytes of data, not even 10% of the available storage on my computer.
Now, my personal media files are all stored in partition "d." I keep my important data in a separate partition of my hard drive so that if I have to reload my Windows operating system, my files will still be there. While I may have some issues with Windows from time to time, for the most part there isn't much risk from this perspective. The real risk is what happens when the hard drive dies. 
With mechanical parts spinning at 7200 revolutions per minute (rpm), it is only a matter of time before something goes wrong. My car engine redlines at 6000 rpm and it rarely runs at that speed for long. It is difficult to get true life expectancy data on hard drives, but it is probably about a 1% per year failure rate (editor's note: don't count on more than 5 years of active use out of a hard drive). Failure must be happening, and on quite a scale. Did anyone notice that Western Digital cut their warranty from three years to one last year?
The only defense against losing those precious files is of course to make a backup. However, unless you have a server farm, this is much easier suggested than done. Ideally, the backup should be in one spot, and not fragmented. Floppy disks (at a whopping 1.44 megabyte per disk) are extinct as a backup medium. My 100 megabyte Zip drive "clicked" into death a year ago. USB flash drives fill up at 1 gigabyte if you're fortunate enough to afford that size. Recordable CD's max out at 700 megabytes, less when formatted for packet writing. Blank DVD's seemed like a capacious solution at 4.7 gigabytes a few short years ago, but now don't seem to scale well. Even the latest dual layer DVD's (at 8.4 gigabytes and their expensive $10 price tag and slow burn times) will not hold all of a moderate-sized media and document collection. Another inherent problem with optical media is that the rewritable discs have a short life expectancy (from my experience), and a new write once disc will need to be used for each backup, making frequent backups expensive.
As hard drives have grown, they have outpaced every other storage media. It becomes clear form the discussion above that the only thing large enough to back up a large hard drive is... wait for it... another hard drive! But even then, how do you use this in a practical way?
Transferring large amounts of data takes a long time. Some folks set up a home network (also known as a local area network). A wired network will be faster, cheaper, and more secure in the end than a wireless network. Of course, the data has to go somewhere, so an older computer can be utilized for this purpose. A word of warning here: if you need to upgrade your older computer's hard drive some of the older motherboards do not support large capacity hard drives. This is a good option for those with space for another computer, and access to an older computer with a large hard drive.
Another option is an external hard drive. A USB 2.0 or firewire connection becomes a necessity to transfer gigabytes of data. This is the route I chose. With a 120 gigabyte external drive, at least it will be a few years before this fills up with all my important files. With a USB 2.0 interface (very important as you select a hard drive to use), it still takes about 1 minute to transfer each gigabyte of data. I will readily admit that I do not even back up all the memories at least once a month. I am always thinking "I will just put a few more pictures on the computer so when I backup it will all be there." Somehow another month goes by in the meantime.
A final option is an internet photo storage site like Yahoo Photos or Ofoto. They promise photo storage and sharing, with prices ranging from free to nominal fee. I have used Yahoo Photos to share photos with distant relatives and it worked very well. The recipient just has to click on a link and a nice slideshow of the pictures you uploaded appears. Your recipient can even get prints of any pictures they like through the website.
While this works very well for photo sharing, I am less enthusiastic for long term storage. When I obtained my first digital camera from Epson, they had a photo sharing web site and encouraged users to upload their files for long term storage. I uploaded some photos, and otherwise forgot about it. About a year later I received an email from them stating that they would no longer offer the service, and we had less than thirty days to download our files, or they would be deleted. With an experience like that, you can see why I would be less than enthusiastic to entrust my memories to this type of service, and keep the picture files on my computer.
In the end, while the cabinet full of pictures has stopped growing, now the mess has shifted to my hard drive. I do my best to back it up, but it is an added chore to our busy lifestyles. Let's all hope that the hard drives in our computers last and keep our precious memories safely preserved. If they don't, at least I'll still have the old pictures in the cabinet. Any really important digital picture files I should get prints of and stick in the shoebox anyway. They may not be organized, but at least they'll still be there.
Buy an external hard drive from Amazon:
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