Recovering old digital images

By wanting to post photos from our 2002 trip to Patagonia, I realized that what I still have accessible on my computer (via my old desk-top backup) are web-sized images, downsized from scanned slide images, from presentations that I did at that time, so the "original" files are still on CD's or an ancient FireWire drive.

Well, there's no museum for our travel photos, but it would be nice at least to have access to those scanned slides in their ".tif" form.

So, do I reconnect the old back-up drive (it would need two additional adapters and who knows if the drive will still boot), or do I just buy a CD/DVD reader/writer to read the back-up travel CD's that I'd made years ago, if I'm interested in specific travel photos?

What a curious choice!

I ended up going for the CD read/write drive -- it's a stable entity, apparently, and the young fellow at our local Mac shop is seemingly luddite in his inclinations, and I've had external hard drives fail before, trying to extract out the last data from them, before they're gone forever.

For the local shop to transfer all of the images from my old external drive would have cost $120 plus a new hard drive.  (The old hard drive, aside from the travel images, included an LW office component, which I know I don't need -- "office"was my work office.   My home office was my study.)   The second component was LW garden and family images, which I'm sure were saved elsewhere.

So...even though I'm quite sure I don't need those higher resolution images, I opted for comfort -- I can open those CD's if I want to, but I don't need to.  The Mac SuperDrive is ready to read what I want to, and strangely, write whatever I want to save, too. I have lots of empty read-write DVD's, I realized, opening up that box of old saved photo ones.  Uh, back up info?  Better than the cloud?  I have no idea, but I'll do both.

Here's a wonderful photo from our most recent trip to Patagonia.  The mosses were amazing.

In Patagonia


Comments

  1. Hubby and I now only have one computer that has a CD reader in it. My MAC doesn't have one any longer. Most of my backups to CD will soon be obsolete. So glad you have a way to recover your images before they were gone. We bought our own 'cloud' at home, so that is the route we use most often now.

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