Archives and Space

One of things I'm starting to look is my photo archive.

Having photographs that I have shot, going back more than 50 years, plus all the family archives that now stretch back well over a hundred years I am running into a problem of space and what to do about the future.

It is hard to count how much I have but at a very conservative guess over three quarters of a million images.

It was brought home to me strongly today when I opened an archive box. The contents are over 5000 slides that are spares from early shoots.

No idea what exactly is here. Many will go straight out but even a quick check shows there are lots of pictures of the family, houses and cars that I don't have anywhere else. 

I also tried to do a list of how many different formats I have stored. At a rough count I recon that there are nearly 80 different film formats counting, colour and B+W and slides. Plus all the polaroid formats. Ranging in size from 110 to 10"x8". Plus digital and some video and a bit of audio. 

Data

Ever wondered what 534 CDs and DVDs looks like?

This is my 'office copy' of all my images. Originally I had done a second copy that I stored off site. The off site copies had gone a few years ago, but I had never got around to getting rid of the office copies. They were on a shelf units, on top of a filling cabinet and in the box in the picture. 

Starting from 2001 there were 329 CDs. Then I moved onto DVDs, all 205 of them. I stopped writing to DVD in February 2011, after that I have shot around another 400 GB of data which went straight to hard drive.

Over the next few weeks I will go through all the disks checking I got all the data from the offsite set when I wrote them back to hard drives. Then each disc will be cracked to render them unreadable and sent of to the dump. any plastic and paper that can be recycled, will be.

Should keep me busy for a while!

Data Data and more data.

I came across an interesting link today.  A Trillion Trilion megabytes. 

This got me thinking about the data I create.

I am currently sitting on about 2Tb of data this all the images I have created since the year 2000 it currently is backed up onto two desktop drives. these are about 3 years old and are due to be upgraded. Not having looked at the hardware in a few years I found this.

Brand	Samsung
Item Weight	168 g
Product Dimensions	11.2 x 8.2 x 1.8 cm
Item model number	HX-M201TCB/G
Series	HX-M201TCB/G M3
Color	Black
Hard Drive Size	2 TB

This means I my entire digital life will sit on a 168g drive. That is about the weight of a 5 pack of 120 roll film that I shot unto about 2003. 

So to put things in perspective. 

All my photography from my birth until 2003 consists of a shelf about 6' long full of negatives in folders plus 3 draws of a filing cabinet full of first choice transparencies plus 5 archive boxes of 2nd choice transparencies and this after shredding 2 large bin bags of reject transparencies a few years ago.

All my digital photographs from 2000 until now on a 168 gram hard drive!

Now that would have looked like magic when I started in the business in 1976.

As Arthur C Clarke said. 

Clarke's three laws