Gear Envy

After dilly-dallying for the longest time, I finally bought an advanced digital camera last November on installment. It helped big time that there's zero interest on the payments. It is a Canon PowerShot S3 IS. It has lots of features I haven't fully explored yet. I'm still doing the monthly installments when just recently, the S5 IS was announced. So what's a guy to do? Fall into gear envy, of course. The new model now has a flash hot shoe, just as I am feeling the limits of my camera's built-in flash. The S5 has a 3-inch LCD screen against my camera's 2.5-incher. You get the idea.

I have to restrain myself and be reasonable, just like how grown ups deal with situations like this. It was to be expected. New models come out every month. I remember the first camera I bought. It was another Canon, the original Elph/IXUS. The APS film format is coming out strong then and it seemed promising. I was not enjoying filing 35mm negatives and thought APS will help me get organized. Well, you can judge its success by the number of people who still remember what APS is.

Anyway, when I bought my Canon Elph, it was so new and chic and fashionable some Hollywood celebrities were being caught in public clutching or using one of their own. I had my own short period of fame while taking shots and people would get amazed at how small and beautiful it was. I never got my celebrity status though. LOL

After a few weeks, the Canon Elph 370Z/IXUS Z70 came out. It had a longer zoom. The pop-out flash looked sturdier. Needless to say, I had gear envy.

It was not exactly a happy ending with my Canon Elph. I definitely had some fun with it, not to mention some memorable shots. I still have it but now, it doesn't have a lens cover. It was malfunctioning and replacing it meant replacing the entire lens assembly. Losing the retractable lens cover was more practical. I would be hard pressed to find film for it now and I always hated the weakling CR2 battery it used. Thank goodness for digital.

Backups and Archives

Where is all your digital stuff? They are likely everywhere: in your office computer, in your home computer, on your laptop, cell phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera, memory cards, thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, and portable hard drives. Not to mention on servers all over the Internet, from free email sites to online storage services. Making a backup of all this stuff suddenly became easier. With the dilemma of how to get started organizing and collecting all that stuff, might as well give up. So easy, it's effortless.

But suppose, by some concurrence of events, maybe the alignment of the planets, all of your stuff were present in your home computer's hard drive. Let's not go into how they were able to all fit in there but rather what to do now? Making a backup of all the files should be a straightforward task. Burn them all onto DVD-Rs. Copy all of them onto another hard drive.

The thing is, a hard drive can crash or will inevitably reach its end of life at some point. DVDs get scratched or deteriorate after several years. Hardware become obsolete. Just a few years ago, it seemed like everyone was using Zip disks. And floppy diskettes! Don't tell me you forgot about them already. If you want your backups to be usable and readable 50 years from now, things don't seem to be straightforward anymore.

If you really want to go into the best practices for archiving, I think it will take a master's degree in Library Science for that. There is a great resource from the Library of Congress web site on what you can personally do. It's part of their Digital Preservation initiative.

Today's CDs and DVDs will be part of nostalgia in the future like LPs and 8-tracks are today. For anyone who would want to preserve their data indefinitely, like me, it will have to be perpetually making backups plus backups of backups. And when a winner comes out of the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD rivalry, we'll have to make backups on that too.