Crash Test Dummies

In the wake of the recent California wildfires, there were a spate of “What would you grab in case of fire?” stories. Naturally most folks would reach for out least replaceable possessions. After living things, these included family documents and the visual documentation of our lives – photos.

But how do we grab for photos? Are they in a shoebox under the bed? On the top shelf of a closet? In large photo albums arrayed along a bookshelf? Strewn helter skelter in varying frames? And what about all that video you’ve shot over the years? You might want to grab the moments of your life, but are they grabable?

In the age of digital photography and videography, this problem is somewhat simplified – our most recent digital imagery is stored on our PC’s hard drive.

Your PC’s hard drive, though, is the least safe place to store your digital images and video. Why?

Hard drives crash. They are mechanical devices. They wear out. Storing all your photos and video on your PC’s hard drive is like speeding the wrong way on a freeway – it’s not a matter of if you will crash, it’s only a matter of when. The older your hard drive is, the more likely it will crash, taking all your irreplaceable digital memories with it.

You’re not the only one living digitally dangerous. According to the Photo Marketing Association, just 39 percent of digital camera owners back up their pictures, which likely includes a large chunk of folks who define “backing up” as simply transferring their shots from SD card to PC.

There are three quick, cheap and easy methods for backing up your priceless digital visual files: an external hard drive, DVD and online.

Option 1: External hard disk drive.

If hard disk drives crash, why back up to another hard drive? It’s called redundancy, a primitive form of what people in the corporate IT world call RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Drives). The theory is multiple hard drives won’t crash simultaneously, and data lost from one drive can be replaced by backed up data on a parallel drive.

And external hard drives are CHEAP. You can buy a 250GB external drive from suppliers such as Maxtor (made by Seagate), LaCie, Iomega or Western Digital for less than $100. Is the safety of your personal images worth $100?

External drives nearly all include free automated backup software. Once you set the backup parameters – which files you want updated, how often you want the backup to occur and at what time – the entire backup process happens behind the scenes without you even thinking about it. Most external drives connect via USB 2.0, but some, such as the Maxtor OneTouch4 Plus, adds faster Firewire and the even faster eSATA (External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) connectivity now found on some higher end PCs. You can also buy an external PCI eSATA connection card.

The latest trend in backup drives is the addition of software and/or an Ethernet jack to make the content stored on your external drive accessible via the Web or from any other computer on your local area network. LaCie’s 500 GB Personal Media Server ($199.95) uses Ethernet and Axentra’s HipServe software to make your content available not only on other Web-enabled PCs, but to your TV as well.

If 250 GB or 500 GB isn’t enough, which won’t be if when you’re storing home video, many companies are now offering 1 and 2 terabyte drives – a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.

The ultimate back-up system may be Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, software that enables a dizzying breadth of backup, sharing and both local and remote access options to all your PC-based content on a multitude of compatible devices. The first Home Server-compatible product will be the HP MediaSmart Server, essentially a PC-like tower with four hard drive bays. MediaSmart’s basic configurations are 500 GB ($599) or 1 TB ($749) but can be expanded with additional multi-TB drives to achieve a theoretical capacity of up to 9 TB.

Option 2: DVD-r

Cheaper but more labor intensive is burning your digerati to DVD. You’ll be able to cram around 1,500 8- to 10 megapixel pictures or around an hour to two hours of video, depending on the source (VHS, Hi8, MiniDV, HD) onto a single 4.7 GB DVD-r. Blank DVDs are around twice the price of blank CDs, but DVDs can store 10 times as many pictures. Depending on how many pictures you have, one blank DVD may be all you need.

But don’t trust your memories to those cheap 100 DVDs for $10 that you bought on sale at the local drug store. These DVDs are cheap for a reason – they’re crap.

These inexpensive DVDs have a silver reflective layer. Silver oxidizes, sometimes in as little has six months. Oxidizing creates black spots on the disc, which means dropouts in your pictures and video. Invest in your memories and buy blank DVDs with pure gold reflective layers, available from Memorex, Delkin and MAM-A. Anyone else selling “gold” DVDs likely mixes the gold with silver. Good, but not best.

MAM-A used to stand for Mitsui Advanced Media – American (they’re now owned by someone else). Mitsui, a well-known industrial chemical company, developed a substance called phthalocyanine, which is used in the DVD dye layer, which is where your data is burned into pits. Phthalocyanine dye, which results in a green-ish recording surface, results in cleaner, better-defined pits, reflects better to make it easier for the DVD player laser to read and reconstruct your pictures and, most importantly, helps give the disc a longer life. DVDs and CDs with gold reflective layers and phthalocyanine dye result in discs that have rated lifetimes of 100 to 300 years.

Once you burn your photo DVDs, don’t keep them around. Put them in a fire-proof safe or a safety deposit box like any other family heirloom and where they’ll be safe from natural disaster for years to come.

Option 3: Off-line storage.

Unless you keep your external hard disk drive and/or backup DVDs in a fire-resistant safe or off-site in a safety deposit box, local storage is susceptible to the same natural disasters that could result in the loss of everything else you own.

Instead, store your photos and video where fire and water can’t get at them – on a remote server. Most of the most popular online photo sites, however, compress your photos for online storage and won’t let you download them at full resolution. Shutterfly, for one, doesn’t compress uploaded photos, and allows you to upload multiple files as a group instead of one-by-one. Best of all, you can store an unlimited number of photos free without making an annual purchase, which is usually required at other photo sharing sites.

Shutterfly, however, like Kodak Gallery, Flickr, Snapfish, dotPhoto and other similar sites, are designed more for photo sharing or ordering prints. If you need to recover your pictures, Shutterfly charges $40 to send 250-1000 pictures back to you on CD.

Relatively speaking, that’s a good deal. But Sharpcast, Fabrik, Xdrive, Phanfare and MediaMax (formerly Streamload) are better, albeit a bit more expensive. Like Shutterfly, most offer automated upload software. Unlike Shutterfly, however, these more specialized storage sites offer a plethora of other features designed to ease upload and/or recovery of your digital pictures as well as keep them organized.

Sharpcast, for instance, automatically propagates any changes you make to these photos to all copies of that picture. In other words, you edit a picture on your desktop, and the changes are made in the copy stored on Sharpcast – and vice versa. The company even enables you to automatically upload and save pictures taken with your cell phone.

Fabrik offers dual backup. Its lineup of external drives ranges from a 250 GB for $99.99 to $799.99 for a 2 TB drive. These local solutions are supplemented by Windows-only 2 GB of free storage of its more practical $4.95/month Fabrik Ultimate Backup off-site content storage with automated backup.

While MediaMax (25 GB free, 100 GB $4.95/month, 250 GB $9.95/month, 1 TB $29.95/month) and Fabrik also offer video back-up, MotionBox specializes in video. For $29.95 a year, MotionBox offers unlimited uploading, storage, sharing and downloading of your footage. In addition to storage and sharing, MotionBox also offers simple online editing functions – you can rearrange clips to create a story – in its online Mixer application.

Off-line video storage is obviously far more complex than it is for photos. First you have to import the video from your camcorder into your PC. Most camcorders include software to simplify this process, eliminating the need to buy off-the-shelf video editing software. Successful uploading of video to MotionBox, MediaMax and Fabrik also depend more heavily on compatibility standards, especially where competing high-definition formats are concerned,. Up- and downloading also can be processor intensive and time-consuming, sometimes as slow as real-time and, for high-definition footage, even slower.

There is no need to choose just one of these three better-safe-than-sorry options. Since all three are relatively inexpensive, a belt/suspenders approach will assure that your life’s memories won’t be erased by the capricious nature of technology. Don’t wait for a hard drive crash to teach you a sad lesson about backing up the digital moments of your life.