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[greck]

(via avantardFolks, this is why you don't do impromptu culling of "bad" images from your digital camera while you're in the field... or after you get home! Sometimes it's impossible to realize the value of a photograph until decades later, and that means you have to let them pile up in the digital version of a shoebox until someone can come along later and

Comments

[avantard]

The down-side to this, though, if you end up with a lot of useless photos that you then have to tag and store. I don't have that kind of time or hard drive space. A valiant effort, regardless.

[greck]

You can't succeed without trying, and you can't try without considering.

The implications of the digital age are kind of terrifying with respect to information longevity... either the data is perfectly preserved, or it's perfectly gone. And even for those who bother to keep their digital records organized, how many have reliable backups?

Some quick digging around the internet suggests there are 70 million homes in the US and 989 residental fires daily, so that's 194:1 chance yearly that you're gonna lose your stuff in a fire. Wow, that's sobering. Where I was attempting to go is that you're way more likely to have a data-losing hard drive failure in a single-disk system than you are to lose your stuff in a fire, but I'm not sure the numbers are going to pan out that way.

Perhaps I should push people to buy fire extinguishers, instead.

Do I really need to be telling people they should have fire extinguishers at home?

[cramer]

20:1 is a long shot; 200:1 is "not gonna happen" odds. :-)

While I cannot give any hard numbers, I've never had a fire (and no one I know has either.) But I and almost everyone I know has had at least one hard drive die on them. Quite recently in fact, Virgil had a power supply failure that literally fried everything in the machine -- taking a weeks worth of game development with it.

[greck]

that's exactly where I was trying to go before I got quagmired in making up statistics. :-)

[cramer]

Statistically, I'm sure this happens "often", but given the number of people going through the gates and the number of pictures taken, it's still a really small number. The really awesome thing is they noticed.

It would be interesting to "tag" all the photos from my family. However, that will be a bit hard as some of the people in those pictures are 150-180 years old now. (I have a picture of my great-great(-great?) grandfather on my mantel. I don't recognize anything in that picture.) I scanned all of my grandmothers pictures after she passed away several years ago. That was a lot of pictures; it took a week. I promised I'd scan all of my mom's, but she has 5x as many to process.

[warped]

Off topic but hey! A dedicated LJ only post from Greck! Haven't seen those in a while!