As seen at Winterail 2014
Waiting for the Cars 218 3D stereo
Archiving
IN MY DIGITAL HORIZON COLUMN in the March 2008 issue, I covered various meth- ods of making archival backups of digital railfan photos to protect from computer fail- ures and other calamities. But the digital world is in constant change, so this month I would like to cover the backup options that are currently available. First, let me re-stress the need to do not
only frequent but multiple backups of your digital photos, on two or more hard drives separate from your computer. Multiple hard drives in the same computer, or a hard drive partitioned into two or more drives, can all be subject to the same malfunction or virus attack. And always make a quick backup copy of any new photos when you first load them into your computer.
The Cloud One of the biggest changes in photo archiv- ing options is “the Cloud,” a system for send- ing computer files via the internet to any of a large number of internet connected remote computers (seemingly, your photos are “floating around in a cloud” somewhere in the sky). Advantages include on-going auto- matic backups of your photos; they are safe from a home fire, flood, or hard drive crash, and you can get access to them from any in- ternet connected computer or device. We all have probably heard the advertisements for Carbonite, which is a Cloud backup service, but there are numerous other providers (do an internet search for “Cloud photo backup” or similar). But the Cloud is not all backup nirvana, especially for railfan use. First, you have to have internet service (to protect against virus corruption, some photographers use computers without an internet connection) with a fast transfer rate. Then cost can be a major detriment. While there are free Cloud backup services, these offer only 2 gigabytes (gb) of storage space. Services in the $5.00- $15.00 per month range are for only 30- 100gb of storage. 100gb is sufficient maybe if you are just starting out building your rail- fan photo collection, but if you have several years of digital photos, a backup capacity of
250 to 500gb or more is really what you need, and here the prices can reach $25 to $60 a month or more. A Cloud service is designed for daily or frequent automatic backup of files that may get changed or have new information added each day. This is ideal for businesses to avoid having to do manual backups of their busi- ness files. Wedding, advertising, and other pro photographers who create a lot of new large file size photos each day can also ben- efit from a Cloud backup. However, for the average photographer — such as us rail- fans —using the Cloud to back up the rela- tively few new digital photos we may take each weekend is not very efficient. Cloud backup can be slow, especially for
backups that copy the entire computer files each time, not just newly added photos, tak- ing several hours for large photo files while maybe slowing down your entire computer. Restoring large photo files back into your computer likewise might take a long time. Because of this, you might have to leave your computer on all night or other times when you are not using it, leading to exces- sive computer run time and resulting poten- tial computer problems. Some Cloud services will not backup from
an external drive, only from your main com- puter. If you have moved photos to an exter- nal drive and deleted them from your com- puter to clear up file space for new photos, those photos will not be archived the next time your Cloud service does an automatic backup. If that external hard drive fails, your only copies of those photos are gone. And even a Cloud server can be hit with a virus, potentially losing all your photos (because of this, some Cloud services recommend you keep at least one other copy of your photos on your computer or a backup drive). To see if a Cloud backup service is right
for you, carefully check out the different service plans, listed features, and reviews by actual users. Does the service backup only new additions to a file, rather than always replacing the entire file (which can take a long time)? Can you initiate the backups, or are they automatic so you do not have to re- PHOTOGRAPHY: GREG MONROE
anaglyphs of the
building of the Central Pacific Railroad taken by Alfred A. Hart
between 1865 and 1869! 480 pages just $35.00 postpaid
Nevada State Railroad Museum Dept RF 2180 South Carson Street Carson City, NV 89701
www.waitingforthecars.com
This image of a photo freight on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic out of Chama, N.M., required a lot of computer work in Photoshop to correct a flawed negative, making the finished photo an especially good candidate for archiving to avoid having to re-do all that work if the digital file corrupted.
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