Digital Photos - Don't lose a generation

I had an interesting conversation with one of the owners of Recover My Files, a New Zealand data recovery lab specialising in photo recovery yesterday about how losing hard drives full of digital photos can erase the memories of an entire generation.

Mark said that a large majority of people now have the bulk of their family photos and videos stored somewhere on a computer, DVD or other electronic storage device and that data loss of that type of media could cause the loss of a generation of images and memories.

Photos printed from film and stored in a box up in the top of the cupboard for years, often discovered by children or other family members, often come back to life with the re discovery of them and hours of going through these photos and reminiscing. Digital pictures do not tend to get that reminiscent value to quite the same extent although with the advent of more and more multimedia center style computers and the ease in which to view family photos on your 50" plasma, some of reminiscence is coming back.

I thought back to my family and we have most of the photos of our oldest daughter printed in albums because my generation is one that started out with old-school film cameras. But the younger girls of our family practically have no printed photos, instead they have thousands of digital images and home movies stored on our computer. Conversely we have very vew digital images of our oldest. So do we scan the printed pictures to create digital copies or do we print the digital images? I still haven't quite worked that one out yet. The loss of our digital images and home movies would indeed be catastrophic and coming from a technical background I know that the likelihood of losing electronic data is more likely than losing a box of photos.

One of the biggest problems is that when people lose digital images either on a camera card that simply doesn't work anymore or that USB flash drive which suddenly pops up a message "Do you want to format this drive" and you panic becuase there are hundreds of photos on it, so many of us think thats it, the photos are gone lets move on in that stoic Kiwi style.

Often this is not the case as there are highly skilled technicians around (although only a handful in NZ) who can actually take your camera card or drive apart and extract those photos manually using some pretty sophisticated kit. The prices for doing this sort of work seem to vary from the ridiculously absurd, even though they are precious memories you want back, to more than fair and reasonable.

If you do have to get photos recovered the only advice I can give you is, do nothing to the card, (as you can greatly reduce the recoverability of data if you add anything else to it) pick a company who will offer you a fixed price for photo recovery and one who has the right gear to do the job properly first time. There would be nothing worse than unsuccessfully  trying out a few back yard data recovery enthusiasts who inadvertently makes things worse.

Do you have a large digital photo collection? What do you do to preserve those photos, I'd love to hear how other kiwis are storing their digital images to preserve them for posterity.