Tag Archives: archiving

Photo scanning

Burned four more CDs of photos. I’m using Mitsui Gold 650MB CD-Rs, which I ordered specially. Stores don’t seem to stock standards-compliant high-quality CD-Rs any more; everyone wants non-standard 700MB CD-Rs that are as cheap as possible. So anyway, I’ve finished with the major travel pictures—East Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and a few last shots of St Petersburg. Now to switch back to video for a while…

But first, I finally played Diablo II. I started at around 16:30, and finished just a few minutes ago because I really need to sleep, so I think it’s safe to say I’m going to get my $20 worth.

The joy of loss

Archiving information is hard work, which is probably why I get quite a bit of pleasure out of deleting it. Today I was told that I had officially changed teams at work, so I took the opportunity to make an archive copy of my e-mail, then delete piles of old stuff that I almost certainly won’t need any more. Basically, I trashed everything which was related to the previous job, and which arrived in my mailbox before January 1st 2001.

I’ve done much the same at home—archived off the 20th Century’s e-mail to a CD, and cleared it out of my current set of folders. All those messages I never got around to replying to, all the junk I vaguely thought I should keep in mind but never referred back to… all purged. Bliss.

Photo archiving project / QPS CDRW: the score so far

32 CDs burnt. No coasters.

The old slides take a hellishly long time to fix up. Some of them have aged in inexplicable ways, like the one I scanned yesterday where the sky has turned purple but everything else is fine. There didn’t seem to be any obvious PhotoShop adjustment to make to the whole image to fix it, so I had to resort to airbrushing out the purple. Not much fun, given that there were trees on the horizon.

Burning inside: CD-R and archiving data

Some people may wonder why my web site was left unchanged for over a year. Well, I’m engaged in a lengthy project to digitize my entire photo collection, using a Nikon film scanner to produce 3000×2000 scans direct from the negatives.

Some of the images are decades old, and often the film has deteriorated and needs careful restoration. Color film in the 70s really wasn’t very stable, and these negatives haven’t been particularly well cared for either. My plan is to scan them, fix them, and archive them onto digital media.

Of course, this requires some care—five years ago, it might have seemed like a sensible idea to archive onto Syquest cartridges, after all. Who’s to say what will be around in another decade? Will we even be able to read most of today’s file formats? (How many art programs read NeoPaint files?)

A lot of people use TIFF. Few of them realize it, but TIFF is a really ugly file format originated by Microsoft. I say it’s ugly because I’ve read the specification. It has a zillion variations, including different byte ordering on different platforms. I’ve seen graphics packages which both claim to read and write TIFF, but won’t read each other’s files. So for archiving, TIFF is a definite no-no.

PNG is an open standard, it’s lossless, and it gets better compression than practically every comparable format, including TIFF. Because it uses no patented algorithms, it’s likely that every graphics program will at least have code to read it. Because Open Source implementations of the algorithm are available, I know that if the worst comes to the worst I can always write my own program to read PNG and write it into whatever’s the appropriate format in ten years’ time. So it’s PNG for me.

Anyway, after months of work my hard drive was getting dangerously full, so this weekend I bought a CD burner. Of all the data storage media out there, I think CD is the one most likely to still be readable in a couple of decades. I’m planning on using the Kodak pro-grade gold CD-Rs, which have a rated life of 100 years.

CD is a bit of a bitch to use, however. You have to burn the discs, verify them afterwards, and so on. On PCs, this generally involves a lot of dicking around with flaky driver software; the ThinkPad at work refuses to boot if the CD burner is plugged in, so you have to boot first, then plug and pray, and about half the time it’ll then recognize the drive. Assuming that worked, you can then try and burn a disc, which works about 80% of the time. The rest of the time the CD burning software hangs while updating the catalog at the end of the burn, and you have another coaster.

I was determined not to have similar experiences at home. Of course, I have a Mac at home, so that was a good start. Then I picked out a CD burner which was Firewire, so (a) I wouldn’t have any buffer underrun problems, and (b) I wouldn’t have to dick around with SCSI or USB drivers and termination problems.

Next, I narrowed my selection down to CD burners which were approved by Adaptec (who now want to be called Roxio), who make the Toast software used by practically everyone who burns CDs for a living.

Finally, I picked a drive which had the latest BurnProof technology. This is a hardware feature where if the drive stops receiving data fast enough—say, because Internet Explorer chokes while you’re browsing the web—the laser stops in a controlled fashion, marking how far it had got so it can continue when the data flow resumes. Which means fewer coasters, and the option of burning CDs while doing something else.

That’s the theory. Of course, no matter how careful and prepared you are, the universe has a way of screwing you over. In this case, I managed to get a faulty CD burner, and wasted most of yesterday trying to coax it into working properly. It would act just like it was working, but the CD would never verify and would be full of random (but sonically interesting) flipped bits.

Fortunately, I foresaw even this eventuality. Rather than trying to save $50 by buying online, I had decided to slum it and buy from CompUSA. So instead of paying two sets of shipping charges and waiting several days for a replacement, I picked up another burner this morning. The new one works fine. Rips at 40x, burns at 14x. Sweet!

I’ll carry on using DVD-RAM for day-to-day stuff, as it’s just vastly more convenient than CD. But now when everything’s finalized and annotated and cataloged, I can burn it on gold for keeps.

The CDRW drive I picked was a QPS Que! and in spite of the initial problems, I’m happy with it on balance.