Friend of mine recently tried to get prints of his kids school shots from a national school shoot chain. Turns out, they don't keep the files past 12 months. A commenter suggested the chainshope could have just dumped them for infinity on a $60 portable hard drive.
What follows is my reply.
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That's why you need to use a real studio, ask about archive lengths, and plan accordingly. When I worked at Picture People, negatives (film studio) were shredded after 1 year. Too much space...and only 1 outta 200 or so people ever bothered to ask after the first month.
As to storing them on backups, yes you can do that. Burn a couple cd's or dvd's, or store them on externals. My last event shoot takes up 12GB in space. I can store about 26 shoots on a 320gb HD. School shoot is say, 200 students, @ 500mb each, so 100GB per school.....so 3 schools per drive, shoot 100 schools a year, thats oh 33 drives a year to store, index, and catalog. Ok, lets factor in redundancy since media does fail...so 66 drives a year to store and index. (Note, larger drives do store more, however that simply means more shoots to lose should a drive fail) My question is simple: How much are you going to pay me to store -your- photos for you? If they are that important, buy them and archive them yourself. If I have to do it, or rather if you expect me to do it, expect my rates to rise accordingly to cover storage fees. In checking the chain shops, most seem to have 1 yr or less as an option. Haven't come across any that had more than a year. Indies, we tend to keep stuff longer. (My archives go back 10 years, but I've found some files corrupted when I used CompUSA's media to back up on.)
Now, some places do offer photos on CD, at varying prices. For photos you want forever, best bet is to buy the CD and make a few backup copies of it.
What follows is my reply.
======
That's why you need to use a real studio, ask about archive lengths, and plan accordingly. When I worked at Picture People, negatives (film studio) were shredded after 1 year. Too much space...and only 1 outta 200 or so people ever bothered to ask after the first month.
As to storing them on backups, yes you can do that. Burn a couple cd's or dvd's, or store them on externals. My last event shoot takes up 12GB in space. I can store about 26 shoots on a 320gb HD. School shoot is say, 200 students, @ 500mb each, so 100GB per school.....so 3 schools per drive, shoot 100 schools a year, thats oh 33 drives a year to store, index, and catalog. Ok, lets factor in redundancy since media does fail...so 66 drives a year to store and index. (Note, larger drives do store more, however that simply means more shoots to lose should a drive fail) My question is simple: How much are you going to pay me to store -your- photos for you? If they are that important, buy them and archive them yourself. If I have to do it, or rather if you expect me to do it, expect my rates to rise accordingly to cover storage fees. In checking the chain shops, most seem to have 1 yr or less as an option. Haven't come across any that had more than a year. Indies, we tend to keep stuff longer. (My archives go back 10 years, but I've found some files corrupted when I used CompUSA's media to back up on.)
Now, some places do offer photos on CD, at varying prices. For photos you want forever, best bet is to buy the CD and make a few backup copies of it.
