Published by James at 13:56 UTC Feb 15, 2005
in Family.
said Alec yesterday when he was going to stay at grandma’s place for the first time for 2 nights. He was eager to go there because they have computers with broadband Internet connection in their condo’s resident club house, so he thought he could play computer games all day without M and I nagging him to study.
This has been a weird experience for me. Kind of like a sudden temporal flux. As I am still technically on Chinese New Year holiday, without having Alec around at home for the first time seems like he has grown up to a son-going-oversea’s-age-and-time kind of feeling for me. With M going over this afternoon to make sure Alec studies his school books I ended up coming back to the office cutting my holidays a day short.
Although Alec has much less experience being independent than I used to be at this same age, kids still seem to be growing to damn fast. It seems like only last week that I had to sing him lullabies. Maybe I should recalculate my remaining temporal continuum moving everything up a few year earlier.
In searching for a digital photo, I got frustrated looking through hundreds of CD-Rs which I have saved my digital photos. Which brings me back to my original concern that CD-Rs or DVDs is not the answer. I have been avoiding from buying a DVD recorder as I do not think any of those shiny discs are the solution for long term storage.
A couple of years ago, I had started duplicating a few older CD-Rs as I’ve found two disc already needed special techniques to recover what was in them. Then, I got tired of duplicating them. I mean, to what end would one need to do so when they started dying only 2 years after they’ve been burnt with new files?
I have spent most of the night recopying those digital photos from CD-Rs back to a blank harddisk. It is my intention to store digital photos on HD and duplicates on HD as well. This should allow much faster and easier retrieval as well as longer lasting than CD-Rs.
As I was copying, I found a batch of the same brand CD-Rs with a film of “fog” on the data surface. I suspect it is the front side that gives out some sort of vapor causing the fogging to occur on the data side of the stacked disc on top. I have lost several photos from one fogged disk, some on another unfogged disk of a different brand, and a whole disk of yet another brand. They are all within 4 years of age stored in cold places without direct sunlight. This confirms my suspicion of CD-R not being a long term storage solution, and DVD is basically the same medium only larger – more files to be lost. Stacking is one culprit, but individual boxing or even enveloping is out of the question. It would have taken too much room.
I have been warned by many others that HDs take up much more room than DVDs, but the fact of the matter is, a single 60GB stores 4 of my most intense photo shooting years’ of work. A second for duplication is not too bad. And Picasa could sniff through the entire 60GB HD in no time. Beats burning and switching DVDs while searching.
Given the price of HDs falling monthly, cost wouldn’t be too much of a concern for saving photos on HDs.
WhaUSay?!