Awash in a Sea of Data
I finished backing up the last week’s camera raw files this afternoon. It’s a process that takes the better part of a day to make DVDs. In this case, twelve nearly-full disks of data. Then after I edit and caption the photos I need to back them up again. That’s one of the downsides of the digital photography revolution.
I’ve also completely filled two 200GB hard drives with raw images in 2007. I think it’s time to shop for bigger replacement drives so I can keep working. At least with increasing drive capacities and falling costs per megabyte of storage it’s not an unreasonable prospect.
When I was shooting film I began running out of shelf space to store notebooks full of slides. Every wall of my office that doesn’t have a window or a door is covered with shelving. I don’t know where I would have expanded my slide storage if I hadn’t gone digital.
In the last 30 days I’ve been shooting more days than not and now have over 5,000 frames to edit and caption. That means looking forward to a lot of hours in front of the computer screen in the coming weeks.