Bob Krist on Finding a Digital Photography Archiving Solution

Outdoor Photographer
Bob Krist
January/February 2005
(Excerpted from Resolutions - Ideas to make photography better in the coming year)

Produce digital archiving and storage devices that are easy, stable and, well, archival.  Digital photography isn't still in its infancy; it's a full-blown toddler and there are shooters who have been doing enough of it for long enough that they have substantial archives of photographs. I haven't been doing it too long, and I've got a huge amount of files.

Unfortunately, CDs are too small, DVDs are too slow, hard drives are too prone to failure, and all of them are less than rock stable.  There has to be as much R&D at this end as there is on the capture side.  If it's going to be Blu-ray or multi-layered DVDs or military-spec hard drives, let's perfect it and get it out there.

The other day, I received a stock request for an area I photographed in the late 70's.  Since it was a wilderness landscape area, the views hadn't changed.  I was able to walk to a file cabinet, open a drawer, pull out a sheet of slides I had sleeved up during the Carter Administration and pull out a perfectly good chrome.  I've already had two FireWire hard drives fry in less than a year, and at times, I have more trouble retrieving digital images I shot last month than film images I shot decades ago.  The thought of migrating huge numbers of digital files from old storage technology to new storage technology as the years pass is numbing.  It makes me glad, for once, that I'm not in my 20s or 30s!