[AT] Here we go again OT

rlgoss at insightbb.com rlgoss at insightbb.com
Thu Jan 24 18:15:15 PST 2008


Everything is in three forms at three different locations, one of which is the deposit box at the bank.

20 Gig?  More likely 160 and 320 Gig, one of each plus a handful of 4-Gig Gigabanks.  I buy CD's by the 100's.  It's not uncommon for me to have 300 to 400 ready to use at any time.  I know too many people whose entire collections have been wiped out in a matter of seconds by fire, tornado, etc.  So far, I have resisted the temptation to store the originals at a repository such as local and regional museums, but that is where many of my original family historical documents are headed.  Right now, I'm just doing the hi-res scanning, OCR, captioning, journaling, (digital scrapbooking) and will donate the original documents at a later date.  The trick is to set up an arrangement with a cooperative museum ahead of time so they can plan for the acquistion of the material.

The problem of sites closing down is now a fact of life.  It's something archivists never had to worry about in the pre-electronic era, but now with the rapid turnover of formats and media, every storage facility from your local library right up to the big Internet sites is faced with coping with media migration to keep up with the changes.  The local library isn't what it used to be.

One of the advantages of giving my tractor archives away in digital form is that they get wider distribution among interested people and therefore there is less likelihood of them disappearing.  I feel a little like Tom Sawyer charging his friends for the priviledge of white washing his back fence.  The action of giving the digital copies away is the cheapest insurance I could ever hope to find.

No, I haven't gone the DVD route.  There are two problems 1) too much time spent in "rendering".  A typical scenario is four hours of computer processing for every hour of running time.  2) There is still too much ambiguity about the recording format.  When it settles down a little, I may go that route again.  One of these days, I'll have to make the switch -- all the current "show" programs like Power Point are going to bite the dust -- probably within five years.

YMMV

Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: Bob McNitt <nysports at frontiernet.net>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 18:50
Subject: Re: [AT] Here we go again
To: Antique tractor email discussion group <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>

> >Larry,  store all those pics on CD NOW
> 
> Larry -
> 
> If I could add to Charlie's advice about storing your images on 
> CD (or DVD) ...Something I got in the habit of several years ago 
> might also be worth consideration.
> 
> I purchased a 20-gig external hard drive that I store backups of 
> just about ALL of my critical or important programs & data on. I 
> also usually keep images & videos on either CDs or DVDs to save 
> space and make them readily available. 
> 
> Case in point happened just yesterday when the hard drive on my 
> #1 Dell desktop PC crashed. I already have a new replacement 
> hard drive on the way (www.geeks.com). Once I install it and the 
> OS, I can copy all my external folders & files to it and thus 
> get back to a semblance of normalcy without losing hardly anything.
> 
> We seldom consider what happens when a hard drive crashes, but 
> it can be devastating to lose all the data that may have taken 
> years to accumulate, and much of it -- like images -- will be 
> gone forever unless there's a separate backup storage system in place.
> 
> Bob
> In snow upstate NY
> _______________________________________________
> AT mailing list
> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
> 




More information about the AT mailing list