Plustek 120 Pro mini-review

[Kino]

A very rational approach.

Most online discussions of this sort tend to involve posters with fundamentalist attitudes on one side or the other.

My backup approach is similar to that you describe. I am a hobbyist/enthusiast so my process is less complicated but I do save all my negatives and slides, scan all of them and save them on my hard drive, a portable hard drive, Time Machine drive, Carbonite back-up and multiple clouds. Occasionally, I write important files to recordable blu-rays which should survive an electromagnetic pulse. I figure that any disaster large enough to wipe out all those sources would be unsurvivable.

Don't forget to archive a Blu-Ray reader/writer. That's the problem of Blu-Rays and other physical media...

 

[Helge]

Both on CD and a hard drive. I have read about "bit rot" but never personally experienced it.

Recordable CDs rely on dyes and thermo magnetic effects. They will go soon if they haven’t already.
Hard drives rely on ultra fine tolerances in mechanics and electronics and have very, very small magnetic domains that will flip at some point.

The big BUT will of course for many be the generic term “cloud storage”.
But there is no sign that it will be the end all be all.
Anything where there has have a continuous payment done every month over decades and decades of storage, has a high probability of going wrong at some point.
Real long term secure archival storage should be set and forget. And something you have absolute control over.

 

[warden]

I recently installed Office 2003 on my new laptop from the original installation CD.

I lost my first 30 years of negatives in a move. I have no idea what happened to them.

I had no idea you could still get laptops with CD drives.

 

[Wallendo]

It can be easy to overthink backup. I have no delusions that my work will someday have great value. My goal is to preserve my images for the rest of my life. After I am gone, it is unlikely my daughter will want to sort through tens of thousands of images to find a few keepers. My longer term archival goal is to create curated collections of prints of family and special places to be left behind. I suspect my slides and negatives will be forgotten in a closet until eventually thrown away.

As for file format incompatibility, both JPEG and TIFF are well-established and will be around for decades. JPEG has even outlived improved formats such as JPEG2000 which were supposed to replace it. If for some reason one of these formats is abandoned, I can easily export the files to a new format. I long ago converted my odd-ball formats to JPEG and TIFF files (.sfw, flashpix, .pcd, etc). I do have one PhotoCD. A few years ago I wanted to copy the images at maximum resolution and ended up having a resurrect an old computer to accomplish the task. The key to digital preservation is to keep up with technological changes. My floppies and ZIP disks are fairly useless now.

 

[grat]

I recently installed Office 2003 on my new laptop from the original installation CD.

There's a major difference between manufactured DVD/CD media and user-recordable. Now, a high-quality recordable disk will probably last 20+ years if properly stored. But if you spent as little as possible on media in 1998, then it's a coin toss if it works today.

At least, that was the theory 15+ years ago.

Downside is most modern computers don't come with optical drives.

 

[faberryman]

I had no idea you could still get laptops with CD drives.

I used an external USB drive.

 

[Bormental]

the key is simplicity. You want to make it very simple to keep everything in sync. For that I designate a folder on the drive that is the “permanent archive” and if I don’t want to lose something, it goes into that folder structure.

Absolutely. Simplicity is key.

For non-technical folks I highly recommend Synology NAS appliances. They will run for years 24/7 with zero supervision, dealing with hard drive failures for you, encrypting and uploading your backups to multiple cloud providers of your choice. If you don't like cloud providers, they have an option to sync with each other, just place two (or more) in multiple locations.

They also have a surprisingly nice (definitely beats Flickr) web/mobile album application called Photo Station, which can be used to browse your archives.

 

[Dave Steele]

Just my two cents here. I have used a Minolta 5400 for over a decade now. However, on a very rare occasion, it will start banding a whole strip. Running a recalibration through Vuescan solved the problem every time. I am thinking that the banding may be attributable to a calibration issue, but it is worrisome that no one can isolate the exact problem people are having that explains the banding phenomenon consistently.

 

[Lemale]

Hm, looks like native scanner software sharpens negatives.