digit archive

I have been taking photos with digital cameras since 2002. I still have a lot of those photos, but there are two distinct occasions where a computer or hard drive failure resulted in the loss or corruption of some images. I have previously discussed my attitude to naming files over the years. Thankfully my education in both photography and information management improved that quite significantly and I recently finished going through my archive and giving everything a meaningful file name and organising it in a meaningful way. But the question remains: how can I mitigate the risk of losing my digital files? Can I do anything to salvage the corrupt photos? My first instance of a hard drive failure occurred in 2006. I was backing everything up to an external hard drive and occasionally to CD. It had been months since I had backed up to CD so I lost some photos. I wrote a personal blog entry at the time, stating " this enforces the fact that digital photography is not safe...

Remote Forensic Disk Imaging: MacBook Pro

I had the time to do some testing on a new Windows-based digital acquisitions computer last week. With word that there is a "MacBook" in the collection that needed to have a disk image created, I thought I would take the opportunity to do some testing on our own early 2011 MacBook Pro before the other device was taken out of storage for me to have a look at. I was fortunate enough to complete advanced digital forensics training back in June this year and set out to work out the logistics of the task at hand - how can I create a forensic disk image of an Apple Mac computer using a PC running Windows? My research led me to the discovery of Target Disk Mode (TDM) on Mac computers, which provides the ability to connect two computers using FireWire, Thunderbolt 2, USB-C, or Thunderbolt 3. While this is designed to connect two Mac computers, it also provides the ability to mount the drive on any other computer that has the ability to both connect to and read it. The c...

Silence: File Names and Context in Digital Collections

File names. They are important. I would prefer they do not contain symbols, diacritics or weird characters in them but that is one of the many challenges with digital collecting. Ignoring the fact that I work with digital collections professionally, for some reason it has taken me a while to come to the realisation that giving a file name some meaning is not only useful in general, but gives it context and a voice when it ends up somewhere else. It should not come as a surprise that completing an information management degree and working in a library has that affect. As a photographer, I have been taking digital photographs since the early 2000s (although I would not have called myself a photographer back then). Somewhere along the line I decided that the file name assigned by the camera was important so I never renamed files once downloaded onto my computer. At least I had the common sense to begin organising my files in folders based on year, month and day at some point whi...

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