Phanfare Blog - Latest Comments in Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

erlichson — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:14:16 -0000

DVDs that play in consumer entertainment DVD players are formatted differently than DVDs that contain data. Our product is a data DVD with lots of rich meta data.

The rendered slideshow itself is not on there. We might try to get it on there in the future but there are some technical challenges around that.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

DiFferRentsPace — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:16:45 -0000

Phanfare's qtrly DVD bakup is only a data-dump by album name, correct? What's possible, down the road, to get the complete "story-board" rendition on Phanfare's DVD bakup i.e. full slideshow in created sequence including music, comments, timing, etc.?

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

erlichson — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:55:48 -0000

Correction, we fixed the bug on the filename issue. When you download an image, you get the original filename that you used to upload, even for images that were uploaded while the bug was in place.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

erlichson — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:31:33 -0000

Great to have you as a customer!

We may bring back a referral program. We don't want people spamming newsgroups and blogs with referral codes so need to figure out the best way to structure it.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

vinodis — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:57:07 -0000

Great explanations and spirit!. I signed up as a premium member 5 minutes ago. I think if you introduce a referral program, your service may get more publicity. Whatever, I found Phanfare to be the best solution for my photo + video storage.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

erlichson — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:33:50 -0000

I don't think anyone has built a company with sufficient resources and brand to guarantee that the company will be around 100 years. And I think this represents the main opportunity from our side.

We don't disclose our financials as a private company, but I would like to get to the point where we do disclose them completely because I believe that when you engage a company to archive it is a partnership between the you and the company.

What I suggest for people who are nervous is that they also subscribe to our DVD backup program and get quarterly DVDs of their media. The chance that we and you lose the archive simultaneously is very small.

At this point, as a consumer, you need to look at the integrity of the founders, the background of the board members and the overall transparency of the company.

BTW, I think SmugMug is a great company and a worthy competitor.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

decisionengine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:11:16 -0000

I am scared to put data online. Will your company be around for another 100 years?. I want even my grand children to see the photos. Is your company profitable like smugmug?. what is the transition plan for your company in case the founders are no more with it / no more vc funding.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

erlichson — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:23:10 -0000

we keep the original filename..its just a bug that we don't return it to you on download. it is on our DVD archive disks, I believe.

we do have a bulk uploader today in the pc client that reads your hard disk directory structure and sucks a bunch of data in to phanfare, but its not reliable so we are going to pull it and then fix it.

i think all these things get addressed within about 12 months with lots of other great features coming before then. thanks for your feedback. i hope we can win your business.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

jonschultz — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:17:52 -0000

I should have added that I also use an online service (JungleDisk/Amazon) as an additional backup for some files, so I'm not against online services. In fact, I'd be glad to use Phanfare as an additional backup for photos when the features you list above (especially #1) are in place. Thanks for the good news!
Are there any plans to always keep the original filename when photos are downloaded? That's another big thing keeping me from using Phanfare for more photos.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

erlichson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:21:50 -0000

I agree your solution is viable, but I don't think its all that easy to keep two drives around, swap them periodically, keep them in sync, move the to a friend, etc. and you don't get network access to the data (unless you are also configuring VPNs) or transfer to facebook, or flickr, etc. The online service enables much more functionality around your media. But your solution is cheaper (not including your time) so if your solution meets all your requirements, its a better deal.

I don't know how you are valuing your time, but if I want to do a monthly backup, which by the way means that I could lose 1 month of data at any given moment if I don't use RAID disks, and if that backups takes me an hour per month, including getting the disk from a friend, etc, then that is 12 hours per year. Even at $10/hr, that is $120.

You are right, Phanfare could be a better backup service. Here is what is missing:

+ a good way to get a really large data set up to Phanfare with a minimum of work.

+ Better support for meta data (tagging is not in the product)

+ support for RAW files.

I think we will get to all these within 12 months.

Re: Archiving and preserving digital photos and videos

jonschultz — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:07:16 -0000

I would expect you to be biased towards online services, but your post is too biased :)

My first premise is that most people don't archive digital photos (or music) or don't really need to. Storage is inexpensive, so most people can keep all their digital photos on an internal drive or external drive. But people do need to backup.

There are more options or variations than the three you list. For example, consider using two external hard drives, one that you keep at home and one that you keep in another house (family or friend). You can backup/image your main drive to the external drive, and swap the onsite/offite drives every so often:

Geographically distributed: yes
Survives device failure: yes
Media available: yes
Deals with shifting formats: sorta (if you choose to convert), but JPEG will be around for a long time
Easy to put data in: yes
Easy to take data out: yes
Secure: yes (if you trust your family or friend)
Around in 20 years: yes (purchase different external device when the time comes)
Less expensive than online storage: yes

There are negatives to online storage that are not listed:
- Time and work needed to upload the initial several GB of data (except for Amazon)
- Time needed to download several GB of data (when data needs to be restored)
- Changed files names and folder structure (Phanfare changes filenames)

I think we can agree on the following:
- good backups are a necessity
- online storage is a valid backup option
- people should use more than one backup option (for example, online + external drive)
- with some work Phanfare could be a much better backup option for digital photos :)