This weekend I got to thinking about the perils of data stored only magnetically, and started looking at options for hard-copy printout of photographs. Specifically, all the photographs of my daughter - of my life since the advent of digital photography - are stored on a few hard drives scattered around the Metro Area. I've got three copies of my Aperture library, one at work, one on my laptop, one on my own Mac at home. Fairly safe, right? Redundancy and off-site storage.

But what if there were a perfect storm of failures? I've certainly had a few of those in my life - successive hard drive failures and data corruption combining to kill data that I thought was stored safely. So I started to look at my options online, and came down to three - not mutually exclusive - for hard copy.

The first option is actual photographic prints. There are several online sites that offer them for next to nothing, and you've got a freedom we've never had before in photographs. You can do whatever you want to the images before you ship them off to be printed. Most of the online providers suggest 300 pixels per inch of final print for "true photographic" quality. I signed up with winkflash.com, and they're now offering their "450HD" imaging, at 450 pixels per inch up to 5x7 inches. They offer 300 ppi prints for 8 cents per 4x6, and 8x10s for something like $1.49. I ordered a selection of standard prints, and I'll report back on the quality when I get them. I will probably try Kodak.com's digital prints as well, and then shutterfly.com. Both cost more than twice as much as winkflash.com; we'll see if the quality lives up to the price. Stay tuned!

The second option is a photo book. All of the printers listed in the previous paragraph will make them for you, but I chose to try out a site more built around books than those sites. Blurb.com has their own software, called "BookSmart", and works on a mac. I built a book of my daughter's first year photographs, 26 pages or so, and the price was less than $40 with shipping. This is a hardback 7x7 coffee table book with a full-color cover. Again, I'll let you know what the quality is like after I see it. I'm not sure about the specific archival quality of the books, but I know I've got books from the 60s that still look pretty doggone good after sitting in trunks or on shelves for years. Built in dark storage for the photographs, I figure. I will probably also try lulu.com before I'm done.

The third option is a printer with archival inks. Most major printer brands have such an offering now, but I think I'm going to try out the Kodak photo printers. They have a 5-color cartrige that's $14.99, and a black cartridge that's $9.99, and they claim the ink costs are half of the other major offerings. The new inks from Kodak are pigmented, and supposedly offer the same archival lifespan as Kodak prints (when you use Kodak paper, of course). The printers themselves aren't very expensive - they're all multi-function devices, with the top of line coming in at $199 with a sheet fed scanner/fax. I've currently got the Epson 220R, and I've not been very happy with the photographic results or the cost of the ink. I think it's going to become a dedicated black and white printer with inks from inksupply.com - the Ultratone inks run $65 for my printer, but supposedly offer print quality approaching that of an actual silver print.

I'll report back on the results of these as they come in.