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Archiving As A Constant
13 June 2018
While we've made multiple copies of our images this year, we've neglected to burn DVDs for our offsite backups until today. And even worse, we have a few DVDs from 2017 we just haven't bothered to drop off at our offsite location either.
DVD Backups. Two stacks of them duplicate 120,000 images.
It isn't a case of laziness, though. It's more a sense of futility.
We have over 60,000 images on DVDs. So we've been doing this a long time. Since 1998, in fact.
But DVDs are becoming yesterday's tech. Everything is being streamed. Music, video. So it's getting harder and harder to find blank DVDs not to mention computers that include a DVD reader/writer.
Our DVD backups are beginning to seem like messages curled up on a scrap of paper and slipped into a bottle that has been flung into the ocean. There's very little likelihood they will ever be retrieved.
But as long as we can retrieve them on our languishing systems nearly eight years old now, they are still useful. Vital, even.
And so, despite the winds blowing in the other direction, we will continue to backup to DVD and squirrel them away in two locations.
After all, the worst can still happen.