Arise, Lord Vader Pentax

Jamie Thingelstad has an interesting piece on storage and other issues inherent with digital photography, appropriately titled "The Dark Side of Digital Photography". Says Thingelstad,

The explosion of storage required to accommodate increasing numbers of photos at higher resolution is a genuine challenge. This data management problem is inconceivable to the average person and was only an issue companies with technical staff had to deal with.

He cites several problems, such as storage requirements, indexing issues, expensive and slow backup options, and redundancy issues. But I would counter that these problems always have existed with photography. Let's take them issue by issue:

1. Storage requirements: you have to put your photos somewhere. For most, this is an album, a frame, or a shoebox. The physical photo occupies real estate in a way the digital one does not necessarily.
2. Indexing issues: ever try to hand-write a caption for each of 1000s of photos, let alone enter them into a database?
3. Backups: How much do you think an archival-quality duplicate of every photo you've taken would cost? And how long would it last? And where would you keep it?
4. Redundancy: to the last point - where would you keep your copies? In a large and expensive safety deposity box? At a friend's home? At the office?

I don't think there's anything really new about the issues Thingelstad raises. They have merely changed into, I would argue, more manageable issues. Thingelstad's 4-way home replication solution is, I believe a bit silly, though a start.

Here's my solution. I've been thinking about it for a while and it seems to make the most sense immediately. Challenge me to come up with another that is a better balance of cheap v. reliable. I sort my photos based on date. Every photo is titled with a preceding date, followed by an underscore character, followed by a brief content descriptor, e.g. 20051225_christmas-001.jpg. I then group these files by storing them in directories bearing the date/descriptor code, e.g. 20051225_christmas. These directories are then stored in a year directory, e.g. 2005. I've about 15G of photos so far - maybe more. That's 4 regular DVDs. I simply burn as many "years" as will fit on a DVD, then move to the next. I store the DVDs in a safety deposit box with our important financial papers, our millions in Krugerrands, and the Holy Grail.

The only 2 solutions I've come up with that nearly make more sense (though are not as cheap) are:

1. to have a second, USB or FireWire hard drive to which backups are performed and then that drive is stored in the S.D. box. Still, this doesn't solve the issue of a loss while performing the backup. It would seem having some DVDs (perhaps the new dual layer variety) offsite is still necessary.
2. to have an internet-attached second system with a large hard drive, external to the location of the primary PC.