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I'll go straight to the point. Your photographic file is in danger and it is very possible that you run the risk of losing everything. Be afraid. I know ... very ... scared.
Yes, I will admit it. I am dramatic, even for an alarmist and professional paranoid conspiracy theorist. But as a photographer, I also know firsthand that few things are as valuable as our photographic archive. We have poured our money, our time, our feelings and even our souls into what we have created over the years of work. Ergo, logic dictates that, at least, we should be a little more careful in protecting something that is so valuable to many of us. So, please, allow me a bit of dramatic latitude here.
Now, the objective of this article is not to scare. I mean, I want initially, but it's not the general goal. How is that saying? Do we protect what we love? However, we will only protect what we love once we are aware of its possible loss. By instilling in you the possible loss of your most precious assets, I feel that I can steal your attention, to be able to focus on the real objective of this article. Actually, we can focus on the real purpose of this four-part series of articles on how to keep your photos safe, that this article is beginning.
The real goal is to help you provide the knowledge and tools you need to protect your work, fight rot, fight against disk failures, conquer file corruption, combat natural disasters and never accidentally delete your work
Keeping Your Photos Safe: What Could Go Wrong?
In summary, today there are two types of storage devices in the market. I do not care how you see it, or what industry data you refer to, there are hard drives that have failed or hard drives that are going to fail. If it has not happened yet, it's coming. You can choose between SSD (solid state drives) and HDD (hard disk drives), but both can fail at any time, and both can fail catastrophically. These types of discs work very differently from others, so their failure is different. Either way, the first step in the fight to safeguard our photo files is to know what threatens our data.
SSDs appear to be the wave of the future. Their prices seem to be coming down by the week, there are more options than ever before, they have no moving parts, they are not nearly as susceptible to damage from shock as HDDs, they are lighter and more compact, and they are faster than your traditional HDD (often times much faster). If you want to speed up your computer and are still using HDDs, try moving to an SSD; the difference is quite noticeable. But SSDs are also far from perfect.
Most all SSDs sold today store their data in NAND flash memory cells. NAND is not an acronym and refers to a “NOT AND” logic gate, which is a type of flash memory that reads and writes data in blocks. One of the key limitations to flash memory is that the number of times these cellblocks can be programmed and erased is finite.
There are well-manufactured SSDs and SSDs that are carelessly manufactured, so not all SSDs are created equal. Some can last 15 to 20 years under normal use, and some will last a few years (or less). A larger looming problem is that when flash memory fails, it often fails without warning, and the failure is more commonly catastrophic, meaning you lose most if not all of your data, and recovery, when possible, is costly.
Furthermore, even though the key feature of SSDs is that they store data in the absence of power, they don’t favor its absence for extended periods of time and are subject to a thing called “electron leakage” if they are. I’m not suggesting you use your flash drives and cards every day to avoid this, but leaving a drive unpowered for a few years and then starting it up expecting everything to be perfect is tempting fate. SSDs can also lose data in abnormal temperatures or when subjected to static charges.
HDDs are also an imperfect tool. HDDs are equipped with a “hard plate,” which is a rapidly spinning magnetic metal or glass plate. When I say “rapidly,” most HDDs spin at 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM (revolutions per minute). The 7200 RPM drives have faster read and write speeds, so if you want better performance, go with 7200 RPM.
Naturally, all these rapidly moving things can fail, like anything mechanical. Electronic motors can fail. If your hard drive is bumped or jostled while spinning, it can cause a major “head crash” (the head is the component in the drive that does the reading and writing, similar to a turntable stylus in design), and you can lose data if there’s a sudden power failure while the disk is writing.
Hardware aside, it’s possible to also have an HDD fail as a result of introducing corrupted data (usually self-inflicted) to the drive — this is a logical failure as opposed to a physical failure. Still, HDDs are far more affordable than SSDs, finding high-capacity HDDs is far easier, HDDs are less susceptible to abnormal temperatures, and HDDs read/write lifespans are, in theory, infinite.
Comfort Versus Speed
So the question is, should I choose SSD or HDD? Personally, I use both. There are stages in my workflow where speed and high performance matter more, and the stages where safety matters most. In short, I suggest using HDD for all your long-term storage and using SSD for everything else.
Outdoor photographers tend to store data in a system while in the field and then store it elsewhere in our home or studio. Assuming you are one of these photographers, I suggest that your field equipment be optimized for speed with solid-state drives. Portable SSDs, as of the writing of this article, are now available to consumers at relatively reasonable prices. Hot on the market are Samsung, Western Digital and SanDisk SSD that start in the range of $ 100 for 250GB units to $ 350 for 1TB units. Portable SSDs are half the size of a typical 2.5-inch portable HDD, and are much faster. Using those together with a laptop also equipped with an internal SSD will cause the performance of your field equipment to rise.
Hard drives may be a bit slower than an SSD, but I suggest using them for your entire file, including backup copies. It is true that both SSD and HDD can fail, and there are different opinions and different data sets that say that one is as secure as the other, one is as durable as the other, or one as hard as the other. Just know this: Nothing is 100 percent reliable. Therefore, the key to keeping your data secure is not based on your storage device of choice.
Data Corruption
In addition to hard drives that fail, data can also degrade or die slowly over time. Data degradation, known colloquially as bit decay or bit breaking, is a rare but corrosive problem that can infect our hardware without us knowing. The problem with the degradation of the data is that some or most of the photos may look good, but under the hood things are very bad. And the potentially biggest problem with data degradation is that if you back up your infected data, you've also backed up the cause of the data degradation. This means that the data it recovers in case of hard drive failure is corrupt data. Therefore, one of the tricks to keep our data safe is to make sure that the integrity of your backup is impeccable.
Then there is my biggest challenge, the human brain. I must admit that I made terrible mistakes. On more than one occasion, I accidentally threw large pieces of valuable images without knowing it. Fortunately for my ego, what I mean is not unheard of. Happens. Here is a scenario. What happens if you tell Lightroom to "Remove the disk", thinking that only a couple of images were selected, but actually had a couple of thousands selected, just because he pressed the Shift key while inadvertently selecting? The idea is crazy, I know, but something like this has happened to me, and I did not understand my mistake for several days. I had no idea what I had done and I panicked when I found out, to say the least.
But that is not all. Data corruption can also be the result of defective cables or card readers. Many times I made a visual inspection of a recent import to find corrupt files, and later I resolved my way through my workflow, isolating my problem in one of these simple components. As a result, there are some rules that allow me to transfer data. To begin with, once I click on "Import" in Lightroom, or once I start some kind of data transfer from the card or camera to the computer, I do not move or touch any hardware involved until the data transfer ends . Card readers can corrupt the data, or even a complete import. I also suggest not to edit or delete images in the camera, to try not to completely fill the memory card in the camera, and never, and I never say, to reformat the memory card until a backup is verified.
Written by...outdoorphotographer.com
Published by... Phototrims.com