Oct 28 2007
If a disaster is on your doorstep, what will you do? Whether it is an impending fire, hurricane, tornado, or response to an earthquake, the most immediate reaction is to grab your kids, pets and the family photo album and leave the area of danger. However, today's precious family memories are not necessarily stored as prints in a bulky album or a box, but are often on a computer hard drive, or, even better, on more portable CDs or DVDs.
People just may not take the time to disconnect the computer and tote it out of the house when getting safely out of harms way may only give them minutes to escape.
The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) has been pondering just such a scenario. OSTA wants to encourage people contemplating their own disaster preparedness plans to make sure that archiving their photos and data to easily portable CD or DVD discs is near the top of their preparation list.
Of the thousands of people caught in the turmoil of the recent California firestorms, how many of them left behind family memories in the form of digital photos stored in their computer? And an even bigger question -- how many of those pictures will be retrievable? For those fire victims who did have photos on CDs or DVDs, but were unable to take them with them, if they are fortunate enough to find discs that are intact, don't toss them out just because they may be covered with ash or dirty -- saving those images may be as simple as a little mild detergent and water and drying with a soft cloth, provided the discs are not warped or broken.
"Backing up to CDs and DVDs is probably the simplest and most effective insurance for protecting data, photos, and videos," said David Bunzel, OSTA president. "While many kinds of data can be reconstructed from other sources, precious memories captured as digital photos are especially important to back up. Today, recordable CD and DVD media are very affordable and easy-to-use backup software programs are readily available to make this a relatively simple task for many computer users. Best practices for safeguarding very important data or images would also include making duplicate sets of CDs or DVDs and storing them in a separate location."
Market research from IDC forecasts that more than 200 billion digital images will be taken in 2007, and additional research from the Photo Marketing Association indicates that nearly two thirds of those images will not be printed but will be stored in digital format. For images stored on CDs and DVDs, and not on the computer's hard drive, recovery may be easier than you think.