With regard to archiving, I have been keeping my records and photos of my artwork on my Working Artist program. I guess I haven't been as careful about getting the info onto disks of some kind as I should be. I appreciate the nudge in the letter. Thanks. Donna

I am so sorry about the loss of your painting, and the violation you must have felt to your privacy! At least the thief had superb judgment in stealing your painting, and not your laptop. While I was studying in New York, one of my paintings (4'x6') was stolen. Luckily, I 'found' it in a gallery window, signed with someone else's name! I hope that you find your painting, in good condition, and that there is a plausible explanation as to why someone would steal it. (Apart from just loving it, and having to have it)>

Peter Brown you are so right on! Who among us is such a great master that they must "save records"?

"Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar": I believe this material is at the Library of Congress, not the Smithsonian. Here is a link that works: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/anseladams/

And on the subject at hand, that of archiving: I do take digital photos of those works I feel worth recording. I have done this primarily as a way of evaluating my development as an artist, and a way of presenting my work to people who might be interested in it. It would also be useful as a way of documenting loss, whether theft or other kinds of loss (I once lost nearly everything I owned, so this is not an abstract possibility for me). But I have to confess that I have no interest in getting anal about it, or worrying about creating archives that will outlast me. My compulsion is to create, and once something is done, I don't worry about it a lot. If by some amazing series of events, I become an artist of significant interest, someone will no doubt develop some means of archiving and tracking my work. Won't be me: I need my time and energy to make art.

Your story of the stolen painting made me laugh, not that I am insensitive to your loss but because it brought to mind something similar happening to me years ago. I was taking a printmaking class and did a really nice mono-type of a nude figure sort of in the style of Matisse. After class everyone in the class hung their work on the wall outside the print studio. When I returned to class a few days later, I was looking at everyone's work and then to my surprise didn't see mine. I asked the professor. He didn't know where it was. The only answer was that it was stolen. My first reaction was anger which soon changed to thoughts of that was a great print. It's an irreplaceable one of a kind. Can I ever do anything as wonderful again?" I was flattered and outraged simultaneously. We can forgive the thief with good taste.

I keep hard copy inventories to navigate through the images stored on an external HD and on a set of DVD's; my photographer has a set on his hard drive too. The hard copy inventory is completed by prints of the images onto ordinary paper. I simply go to my main photo library source file and print the entire thing in Mac's a "contact page" format which produces a thumbnail of each with the ID number I've assigned. Not sure anything compares to the speed and efficiency of an eyeball scan of a printed page. After handling lots of images, I gave up grouping via a numbering/naming system. New paintings get the next number in line. The inventory system, created in Excel, allows sorting data by any category I can dream up. Categories include size, title, date created, where the painting has traveled, etc. Another great tool is the iPod. I've got over 100 Tiff files stored on an iPod I carry with me everywhere. It acts as a great marketing tool. Not to mention, you can show family and friends what you do all day! You can set up a mini slide show with interesting dissolves from one image to another. Everyone seems to love it. Added bonus: when you're away from all of your paintings and that moment of "how did I handle the sky in the thus-and-such painting" occurs, viewing that piece on your iPod brings it freshly to mind. Two points: First, I agree with everyone who's made a mention about priorities. While important to archive properly and make good use of relevant technology, it's a challenge to not let painting time get eaten up by all this. For me, it's enough to simply remain aware of the clock. Second, for those doubters who ask why worry about all this archiving ... I take archiving seriously in order to honor the hard work I've put in, not to mention that it is a wonderful self-teaching tool. But I also do this for my family who believes in and supports me--especially on those days when I feel like chucking the whole thing. I spend a great deal of our family's resources (time and money) on this little thing called art, and no one ever complains. They believe in me. Honoring my work by archiving it with serious intent is one way to honor my family for their trust and support. And who knows? We all know that artists more often than not become famous after death. Well, I've got this wonderful little 7-yr old grandson who already has quite an eye for color and composition. Who knows, maybe taking my work seriously will help him set his goals. Marie Martin www.marie-martin.com

Archiving: Plan on having to re-do your archive every 5-10 years to keep up with the technology. When you get to 15 K images (I have over that many photos), only hard drives makes sense. Just plan on having many copies on multiple HDDs. I keep 2 external drives in a safe deposit box in addition to a 1.3 TB Drobo array. Check out www.drobo.com Mel

I'm a geek, who digitizes and Photoshops my wife's (Diann Haist's) artwork for making giclee prints. Regarding digital archiving, here are some points to ponder:

1) First, consider the fact that just one print-image for a full run of top-selling limited-edition prints might well be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thus, for a well-established professional artist, price should be of no consequence where a high quality backup system and archival storage media are concerned.

2) Images should initially be digitized in the largest available size, and NEVER saved/archived in JPG format.

Practically speaking, an 8 Megapixel (or better) camera should be used, with the "save as TIFF" (or RAW) format option selected. Initial files should be over 15 megabytes in size, possibly up to 25 or 30 megabytes for each single TIFF or RAW image. The bigger, the better.

Comparatively speaking, a similar image taken by that same camera, set for the JPG format, will be compressed down to 4 or 5 megapixels in size, and since JPG uses a "lossy" file compression scheme, this visibly degrades the detail of the image (you might say that it goes a bit out of focus), and therefore is unacceptable if you wish to retain the quality of your images. (Also, each time you open a JPG image -- with Photoshop, for example -- and edit and then re-save that image, the JPG compression process degrades that image one more time. It's additive, in other words.) TIFF DOESN'T DEGRADE THE IMAGES. JPG DOES.

Moral of the story: Always use the TIFF format, except maybe when you wish to clone a copy of a large TIFF file down to a small JPG, for emailing or other internet purposes.

3) The original images should be edited in Photoshop (or equivalent editor) and then saved with a pixel density of at least 300 dots-per-inch, at the same inch-size as the original image. This indeed creates huge image files, but so what? Today's technology is built to handle it, and it's constantly improving.

Example: The uncompressed filesize of a typical 14" x 18" TIFF image at 300 DPI, is around 65 megabytes. Some of my largest image files are over 450 megabytes in size, which is astounding when you consider that the first hard drive that the IBM PC came out with 20 years ago had a total capacity of just 10 megabytes. (That's back when a PC with two floppy drives and one 10MB hard drive, cost $4,500.)

Photoshop gives you the option of saving a TIFF file using the "LZW" compression scheme, which is what's called a "loss-less" scheme, meaning it will create a smaller file, but it won't degrade the quality of your image like JPG does. Saved with the LZW compression format, a 65 megabyte file might shrink to just 30-40 megabytes, which is significant when saving several dozen such images to an archival media. I always save my TIFF's using the LZW option.

3) Backup and storage: As a minimum, I recommend having two large hard drives inside your computer, plus a large external USB HD for short-term backup and another which is saved in a fireproof safe, plus a DVD recorder using long-life disc media such as the above-mentioned 300-year-life DELKIN product. When editing in Photoshop, save copies to both hard drives.

I highly recommend plugging your computer and monitor into a battery-backed Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) so you won't lose anything if there's a power outage. They aren't very expensive, and certainly cheaper than half a day of your time if you had to re-do all of the work that you invested in Photoshopping a good image (which you hadn't yet saved), just before a power outage temporarily lobotomized your computer's memory.

I highly recommend Norton GHOST, as a very efficient overall automatic backup program. My next backup upgrade will be an external dual-drive networked hard drive setup (two 500-GB "RAID" drives in parallel), which automatically clones and shares each file onto both hard drives. That way if one hard drive ever craps out, it gives you an alarm and you just replace that drive, after which the remaining good drive automatically clones all of its data over onto the new drive (automatically replacing the broken one), and then proceeds to do its normal storage as usual. Anyone on your home or office network can use that system for storage.

4) Image file database: Do you need a simple, inexpensive relational database which lets you include a visual image of each piece of artwork with each record? I finally found one, with FileAmigo Pro, and it's a delight to use. It only costs $40, and it does everything that I ask. It also allows several networked computers to access a single database file, which is quite handy. Look into it. Archiving is an ongoing process which gets easier and better each year.

Regards, Tom Swanson

I am going to get into hot water here after commenting on Sharon Sprung’s painting. But I usually go where angels fear to tread. I have a problem with the whole New York school of realist artists. In fact, I have a problem with Realist artists as a whole. Being an artist, I certainly can appreciate the work involved in her/their work. (I also went to view her website) Obviously, my comments will not hurt her career in any way. She is doing fine all by herself. Her paintings though well executed are not my cup of tea. This is what makes the world go round. Please, I don’t want a mess of anti-comments to come to my website on this. I’m expressing only one opinion on Realism as a whole. I prefer a looser more expressive form of art. Realism is obviously not that. I know it’s a cliché by now but if I wanted the image to be exact, I would take a photograph. The only expression I get from Ms. Spring’s work is in the attitude of the models. Here she excels. Classical artists, though realist, lifted their subjects to lofty heights thereby changing the “realist” attitude of their subjects for me making it more palatable. I’m all for classical paintings. The work is impeccable. William Bouguereau is one of my favorite painters expressly for this reason. Much of what I see today with realism is only a demonstration of technique. Ms Sprung is one artist that has gotten close to a “classical” feel with her posing attitudes. There is intrigue and mystery and a sense of the person painted. Especially with the stare of the women in PR featured on this website. As for the rest, I don’t care to see the chair as detailed or the feet or toes or every hair on her pretty head. I’ve said that I prefer to see the artist reflected in their paintings but now I realize that maybe I am seeing the artist. And with most other artists, I see more technique than substance. I also think realism is more digestible for the common person. They can absorb this more easily than a style of painting that they don’t understand. All the pieces in their place. It’s safe.

Rick-- If you think Ms Sprung's painting looks like a photograph I am dying to hear what kind of camera you use!

I've just looked at the DROBO storage system and it looks almost perfect for my needs mentioned above, replacing the dual-RAID drive system that I mentioned. Check it out at DROBO.COM and watch their video demo. Quite impressive.

I sent you what I believed to be an extremely important note on the subject of the storage of images (I will use the term “data” interchangeably ) on computers and external media which you chose to not add to the discussion. At the risk of sounding a bit arrogant, with all due respect, perhaps your own lack of experience with digitally stored images and computers is at the root of your failure to accept what I had to say. Or, perhaps it was perceived that I was sounding an apparently unnecessary or even an exaggerated alarm of despair. Let me assure you that what I had to say was in no way exaggerated. You subsequently published a much longer message by Tom Swanson and I want to tell you that, while there is a lot of wisdom in what he and the others had to say, my long-term experience has apparently been different from and possibly more extensive on this subject than anyone you chose to include in the discussion, an event that I have no interest in wearing as a badge of honor.

Your readers, and perhaps you, are being led down an inappropriate and hazardous path about archiving computer files. I see Mr. Swanson, in a follow-up contribution, has already changed his storage du jour from Raid array to a brand new "robot" technology, which shows a lot of promise and is no doubt an improvement, but which may or may not be the ultimate answer or even make it to the end of the year. In addition to my extensive computer and photography experience, I have a son (Brady Essman) who is approaching his tenth year of owning a pretty successful business DigitalMedix of recovering images and data from failed storage devices and media. His charge, for instance, to recover lost data from a Raid array like Mr. Swanson intended to use runs from $4,000 to $20,000 a pop, depending on how much of the stored information has to be retrieved. Single hard drives, CDs, DVDs, digital camera cards, and other media cost less to recover but are still very hard on the budget, especially the budget of individuals The Raid array, as Swanson points out, was designed to be fool-proof against data loss, as is the robot, but isn't. I can see a strong potential for several flaws to exist in the new robot technology that could hamper it being fool-proof.

I'll go back to my suggestion in my first submission that there are only two kinds of computers users - those who have lost a hard drive and those who are going to. Hard drives fail for several reasons. All hard drives, if continually used, eventually wear out or fail - period. The discs on the inside spin and therefore have bearings, and the heads that read and write the data move mechanically, and all of that is run by electricity and circuit boards. Raid arrays use the same hard drives that are in your computer and they also fail. The new robot uses the same hard drives. So, what’s the question. The robot uses a different scheme from Raid so let’s examine why I’m thinking it too could fail. The robot, as it was with Raid, is designed to keep you from losing your data, not your hard drive. Robot claims it is bullet-proof in how it deals with a failing or failed hard drive. Only some, but not all hard drive failure will be protected by what robot does. Some of what causes hard drive failure goes beyond robot’s ability to cope in what it does to protect your data. Hard drives are the weakest link in the storage chain and as long as a technology uses them, that's where your system will let down and how you will lose your data. It is my guess that the new robot, when it fails it will only serve to complicate and therefore make more expensive, the retrieval of data that would otherwise be lost just as it has been with Raid technology. The robot technology is based on a system of multiple hard drives, as is Raid. The robot demo video I watched at Swanson’s suggestion shows how the robot works and is based on the presence of up to four hard drives. When one fails, the data is copied to the other available storage and you just buy another drive and stick it in and the robot does the rest – copying the data to the new drive. That’s what Raid does but the robot is a little more sophisticated.

That, in my opinion, will only protect you if you have one of the hard drives fail at a slow enough pace to allow the robot to work as it has been designed to do. The busiest time for my son’s business is in the Spring when most of the storms and lightning occurs. Hard drive discs spin at a certain speed, something like 5400, 7200, and 10,000 rpm and are dependent on that not changing. Spikes and dips in the electrical system that causes a drive to either speed up or slow down are a serious culprit, in addition to normal wear and tear. As Swanson recommended, an interruptible power supply (ups) can be used to stabilize the electrical supply against less intense spikes and brown-outs but they are limited to relatively short periods of operation, usually no more than a few minutes for the most expensive “consumer” ones. If the drive speed changes for any reason when the drives are being written to or read from, it can scramble the magnetically held data all over the drive. Most likely, it would affect all the drives, not just one. Suppose that happens with only one of the drives, the robot would try to go into crisis mode and start copying the data from it to the other drives which would take much longer than any backup power supply would offer short of an emergency generator such as is used by hospitals and other critical service agencies. If all four drives are affected, there’d be no place to copy the data to so the robot becomes totally useless. My ups gives me a minute to shut my system down but I have to be there to do it or the system will crash. If you have a single rapidly failing drive and you have a ups that isn’t adequate to keep your system powered long enough for the robot to do what it does, your system will crash and if it does while the robot is reading or writing to one or more drives, there’s a good chance that your data will be scrambled on at least one of the drives, if not all, depending on how it distributes the data across the entire drive array.

If, for instance, a power outage hits while you aren’t available to shut your system down and your ups kicks in but can’t last while the robot starts to copy the data from a 500 gigabyte or a 1 or 2 terabyte drive which would take a long time, it will be constantly reading from or writing to, your system will crash and if it does, you’d want multiple copies of your data on other types of media, gold DVD most likely, stored in different locations, as I said in my first posting. You might be able to mitigate some of the risk if you have two robots but whatever took out one might also take out the other. At least you’d be giving yourself a second chance which isn’t always bad. You would be doing your readers a very good deed if you were to dig out my earlier posting and publish it along with this one.

Please forgive me for what seems to be a disjointed post. It seems evidently that I did something to cause my first post to not appear. I'll offer the Cliff notes on what I had to say in my first message. I shared that in my experience of about fourty years with computers, no media is fool-proof over time. Floppies become defective, CDs and DVDs rot, tapes stick together, and hard drives fail. Still, backups are essential. What I wanted to recommend is that multiple copies on multiple hard drives, even RAID arrays should be utilized along with backup power supplies and that hard drives should be backed up on GOLD CDs and DVDs, multiple copies, stored in different locations, checked often, perhaps every six months, and new duplicates made every two years. Further, as the size of images push us to require more and larger hard drives, I suggest that the old ones not be wiped clean but rather that they be retired prior to reaching the end of their functional lives and that they too be stored in a safe, dry, non-magnetic environment. An additional problem is that, while they're all supposed to produce a universally accepted standard of recording, often a CD or DVD drive in one computer cannot read discs recorded in another computer. With changes in hardware and software as they are currently being made, one cannot predict what will be usable a few years from now. Pro photographers prefer a RAW format image to work with because it gives them the closest thing to a photo lab-like flexibility with which to work but each camera manufacturer has its own version of what RAW is and not all RAW images are equal and not all RAW images can be effectively used with all "RAW software." There is a good article in this month's Shutterbug magazine that addresses this issue. I have lost so much data and so many images over the years that I make copies on every type of media available to me at that time and store the copies all over the place. Each CD or DVD should be stored in its own sleeve and above all, do not write on the disc. Some discs say you can not only write on them but can even print on them. Well, only time will tell how accurate that suggestion is and the only way to make sure that doing that will not lead to disc rot is to not do it. I'm not in the business of beta testing a disc manufacturer's effeciency. I need backups and so far nothing I've used is fool-proof. Gold, multiple copies, stored in multiple locations - period. Sorry for any confusion created due to the loss of my first post.