Do you have photos backed up on CDs and think they are safely archived? Think again.
Back in the early days of digital photography, CDs were the preferred method of storing your photos. EHDs (external hard drives) were costly and not readily available and no one had even heard of ‘the cloud’.
My CD library:
Years ago, I had painstakingly created printed photo CDs and full color printouts of all my early digital photos and stored them in high end archival storage envelopes and albums. As far as we knew years ago, CDs were considered safe. After a hard drive fail, I was trying to recover images from the backup CDs and discovered that some CDs had problems. It was then that I began to archive my CD library to my online Forever account and get rid of the CDs.
Today, we know that CDs are not suitable for long term storage. CDs can degrade, and even if properly stored, information can become unreadable, and our photos lost forever. Here is an example of what can happen to images after time on a CD:
This image was properly stored
on a high quality CD, in an archival storage sleeve, in a temperature controlled environment. It was saved as a large, high quality TIFF, and yet when I opened it years later, the file is corrupted and unreadable.
Our digital images are more at risk than our printed images. External hard drives (EHDs) fail. CDs are unstable. Social media and free clouds storage sites are sold and could disappear, right along with our accounts and images. Remember Picasa, anyone??
For the past year, I’ve been working on uploading my old photo CDs to an EHD and at the same time, to my permanent online storage account. I’ve been able to upload and preserve several hundred CDs and many thousands of photos. The photo to the right shows only ONE stack of CDs from six albums. That’s a lot of unnecessary clutter.
I am practicing the 3 method backup plan of: one on-site copy on an EHD, one off-site copy by backing up my entire computer and EHD using Backblaze, and my permanent cloud storage resides with Forever. Not only do I know that my photos are safely backed up and available on all my devices, but I’ve cleared off an entire bookshelf, shredded all the CDs and donated the albums to someone else who can use them. Wins all around.
The bottom photo gives a peek into one of my yearly online albums in Forever. Everything is organized and available on all my devices and easy to share with family members, while remaining totally private. I can organize in any way I want and know that I own my storage, and am not renting it. If you are not familiar with Forever, please see this blog post.
So where can you start? I’ve learned that with most projects in life, most people have either time or money. If you’ve got both, lucky you!
If you’ve got money - the short answer is to pay someone else to archive your CDs, or any other media, and store your images in at least two places: an EHD that you keep in your home or safe deposit box, and also a safe, permanent online cloud service. I use Forever because I truly believe it’s the best option.
You can find a professional photo organizer who can upload your photos from any source, but they can be pricey, charging a minimum of $50/hr and up. This may sound like a lot, but I have found that with most organizers, you save money in the end because they are so efficient. And even more important, they don’t have an emotional attachment to your photos, which means they won’t spend time agonizing over decisions. They will get the work done quickly.
Or, you can hire a media conversion company. There are lots to choose from, but I also trust Forever to convert any media I send. An extra bonus is that Forever will automatically upload your media into your Forever account, saving you the hassle. A full list of pricing his here. I primarily use Forever for scanning and also digitizing old home movies, but they also can upload your CDs.
If you’ve got time - you can do this easily yourself. I will say that I personally upload my own CDs - or hire my son to do it - because it’s a straightforward process. My iMac and MacBook no longer have CD drives so I purchased an external CD drive like this one and I simply open my Forever account, open an album, and click ‘Upload’. A window opens and I can select where the images are (in this case, the CD drive) and the upload begins. Forever can also detect duplicates, saving storage space for only new photos. You can turn this option on or off in the upload window (shown right).
Do you have CDs that need to be archived or have you already successfully handled this challenge? Let me know in the comments.