How To store my collection ....

[Foto]

Hey awwlll .....

i take photographs alot ... fill my camera`s 4gb card daily lol ... i download them in my computer hard drive and then write them on dvd n delete those i have in computer as i have a dvd of them now .... but recently i came across a problem that when i accessed a dvd of my digital images almost half of them were corrupted i mean it says `No preview available` did i lost those pictures ????? i have checked other dvds but they are all good .... only one dvd has that problem .... now i want to ask is how can i store my pics safely ??? where i dont have the fear to loose them as i lost in my dvd. ???? is there any reliable way to store my JPG files where they can never be corrupted ???? and yeah ... can i recover those files from my dvd ???

thanx all for help in advance

[Viana]

... is there any reliable way to store my JPG files where they can never be corrupted ???? and yeah ... can i recover those files from my dvd ???


thanx all for help in advance

Never? Probably not, but you can do much better.


All media will fail eventually—especially CDs and DVDs. CF and other camera cards also go bad.


You should backup via 2 external hard drives. These days a couple of terabytes cost less than $200.- Keep the backups in separate locations.


Yes, there is recovery software and if all else fails, there are companies that specialize in recovery. The first is free or inexpensive, the latter will cost you.

[rpcrowe]

WASIM... Years ago an instructor at an Adobe Photoshop course recommended:

Back up your images two times.

I no longer use CVD or CD storage because it is too hard to find the images and to access them from DVD or CD disks.

Instead, I back up my images on several external hard drives. I save the images as RAW and when I have selected and worked on the images, I save them as Photoshop Documents or as JPEG - depending on my needs. I probably should convert them all to DNG but, that is a lot of work.

I have two external hard drives on which I store the unedited versions and two hard drives on which I save the edited images in their appropriate formats. In all, other than my computer's internal hard-drive; I probably have about four Tetrabytes of external hard-drive memory.

I group my images in logical groups - such as the images of my trip to China are stored in city groupings. They are quite easy to find that way.

I have just received a copy of Lightroom-3 and will be organizing all of my images through that program with key words, meta data, etc.

In addition to selecting images by subject, I want to be able to get a selection of images which I shot with a specific lens or camera or even focal length and Lightroom will allow me to do that.

The only hard part is to organize the many thousands of images (both RAW and processed) I already have on my various hard-frives.

[Mark von Kanel]

Hi Richard, you can set up LR to convert to DNG on import, and as youll have to import all your images to organise them, its job done!!

mark

[Foto]

ok .. but how to tackle that `no preview available` problem ?? i mean i knw the pics that have this prblem cant be recovered but i dont want to see that msg on my other pics ... `future precautions` u know ... so ... what are the precautions needed to be taken to avoid that `no preview available` msg from seeing again .... ... and if any solution for those pics that already have that `no preview available` problem .. is also appreciated ... thanx

wasim

[rpcrowe]

Thanks Mark...
That is good to know regarding DNG. I have also learned that I can set up Lightroom to save my images in two different places at one time...
I have not had the time to even dabble with Lightroom yet. We have been pretty busy with our Maltese Dog Rescue Program...

[FrankMi]

how to tackle that `no preview available` problem

When saving files to some of the CD or DVD, you have to finalize the media and write the index in order for it to be accessable on another PC. If there is a possiblility that you didn't finalize the DVD, take a look at this link: http://www.cd-info.com/howto/finalize/index.html

If this doesn't help, try reading the DVD on different PC's as it may read on one PC but not another. If that fails, you'll need to try recovery software.

If DVD's are the only copy of your files, you need to make multiple backups of the files you really want to keep (on something other than DVDs) while you can still read them. DVD's are NOT a reliable media for long term storage of critical files.