Scanning photographs

[Mungbeans]

Around the preview is a "running ants" kind of border - or stipled line. Mouse over the edge of it. When the cursor becomes a "double arrow": Drag the stipled border and adjust it so it only surrounds the actual target area; the photo itself. The software will always adjust for what it believes is optimal contrast and colors within whatever is the selection area at any time.

I think this was part of my problem.  Most of the photos I'm scanning have white borders. 

I also discovered, in the depths of the scanner driver that one of the options had been changed so the midtone was blue rather than neutral.

After resetting the driver and not scanning the white borders my scans came out looking great.

[Mungbeans]

This has been mentioned before on Rootschat, if you are bothered about long term storage, use a google mail account, by invitation from somebody who already has one - about 2600 Mb of storage free to keep all your storage offline.

That is one I hadn't thought of.  I actually use a gmail account as my reply-to email address.  That way I don't have to worry about notifying anyone if I change ISP.  I hadn't considered it for storage.   I suppose you just email the address with the photo as an attachment.  It is limited to 10mb per message, so I couldn't use it to store the scanned originals, just the edited copies.

Another problem might be that you have to log-in every few months or you risk having the account closed for being inactive.

[Mungbeans]

I hadn't expected the storage media question to be so controversial!

Another point to bear in mind (for long-term planning), is that recording media change !!  There are many horror stories of firms and governments carefull collecting and saving data on magnetic tapes and punch cards -- but the necessary equipment for reading them isn't being made any more !!!!

So keep a weather-eye on technical changes, and be prepared to transfer your collection of CDs and DVDs onto whatever the newest "standard" recording medium is, every 10-15 years !

I have to admit that I've had many CD failures, having once worked in a small software development business. 

At the same time hard disks are also not immune from problems:
a) Obsolence:  as mentioned above, this is a biggee.  I have some old 5 inch floppies with my old law notes on them somewhere in the garage   Hope I don't need them in a hurry.
b) Damage.  My brother went out one raining day and arrived home to discover his computer totally zapped by a lightening strike.  Hard disk smoking!  Oh the humanity.
c) Theft. 

Considering all the above, I'm thinking that I will back everything onto CD's x 3.  One copy for me and send the other two off to siblings for safekeeping.  I'll ask them to copy them onto their computers to be double safe.

I'll review and rewrite the CDs every year.  This needs doing anyway because of the amount of new photos I'm always receiving from distant cousins.  I discovered two weeks ago that one CD backup from two years ago was only partially readable.  My good luck I still had the photos on my hard-drive.

I will also set up an auto-backup routine from my main hard drive to my slave hard drive.  A poor man's RAID.  (Last upgrade I couldn't be bothered copying everything over so I just had the old hard-drive installed as a slave drive.)  You would have to be very unlucky to have two hard-drives go bad.

I'm going to be very very busy.

Leonie

[Guy Etchells]

Been there - 4, 80Gb hardrives set up as a raid array to give 160 GB backed up by 160 gb. Raid controller died taking two drives with it one from each array leaving no back-up on the array at all - will never touch raid again.

I feel sure cds will last as long as required- 15 to 20 years then new equipment will have made CDs obsolete so no need to worry about greater longevity.

My back-ups include paper (every 6 months), CD (each month), external hard drive (two used alternately on a monthly cycle two weeks after the CD back-up).
Cheers
Guy