My friend George blogged about a nearly catastrophic loss of his wedding photos. He got me to thinking about my own stash of negatives from the pre-digital days.
Back in 1998, when I started Guide to The Point (which became PointBuzz), I had a real live Nikon negative scanner, which cost something like $800 at the time. It was fairly awesome, even if I had no idea about what I was doing with photos at the time. Many of those photos are still on PointBuzz, in fact, including all of the constructions photos of Millennium Force. But even with that sweet hardware, there were still about eight years of negatives dating back to high school, and a few years after, that never made it into digital form. I've always wanted to remedy that.
I got my first digital camera I think in 2001, and a few years later, my first digital SLR. Since then, I have amassed about 124 GB of photos totaling around 15,600. That's probably not all that much, but consider that many in the first few years are JPEG's scarcely a megabyte, while the average raw file to come out of my 7D these days is around 25 MB.
While not foolproof, I have a pretty good backup system in place. Locally, my photos all get backed up to a drive on my router via Time Machine. They also get backed up to Amazon's S3 service via JungleDisk. Combined with my entire music collection, documents and backups from my Web server, I'm using about 168 GB at a cost of about $26 per month. I happen to think that's a pretty good value, because if my computers were to go up in smoke in a fire, I wouldn't lose any of that data... which to me is a lifetime of memories.
But I still want all of that old stuff. I've become sensitive to this when I think about how little is left from my childhood in my mom's collection of photo albums. My dad actually has quite a few slides from when I was a kid, and he's looking through that stuff now. I want to make sure Simon has a solid record of his childhood, still around when he's a grown up.
I don't know how many negatives I have. George used ScanCafe and was pretty happy with the results. At 29 cents a frame, it would cost me $290 for a thousand photos. Considering the cost of a scanner, and more importantly, the cost of my time, that might very well be worth it. I have to see what I've got. In the film days, I wouldn't generate nearly as many photos because of the cost of film and processing. I suspect my "keep rate" was probably as high as 75%.
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