As I have noted in my Perils and Addictions article on digital capture, as alluring as it can be, sometimes the digital world can be quite consuming in learning new terminology and technology and how it fits with your photographic life. After all, my thought process with regards to image retention used to consist of how many slide pages and labels I needed to buy, and how many pages I could stuff in my file cabinet. Perhaps someday I might need to buy another file cabinet. Pretty simple stuff.

With no more slides being added, only megabytes – the scene changes quite a bit! I don’t even buy that many music CDs anymore as most of it is purchased online and downloaded. This needs to be stored and backed up just like your images. Having a digital life can simplify and add stress at the same time. 🙂 As I alluded to in the article, I have jumped into Terabytes of storage. Five years ago, I definitely would have needed to look up what exactly that means and how many zeros are in that figure. Not that I need all of it right now, but similarly in how I organized my slide files, I like to plan ahead and make sure it is a system that can grow with me and my image collection without having to redo all of the logic.

Who would have thought just adding more slide pages and file cabinets would result in needing to learn about NAS (that’s Networked Attached Storage for you lay-people 🙂 ), Gigabit Ethernet and Jumbo Frames, and RAID arrays? Ahhh, but there is no turning back.. hook, line, and sinker..