13 Feb 2006 - A terribly large memory!
As computers have got bigger, we've happily moved from kilobytes to Megabytes and then to Gigabytes. But now, the total storage space on the Friends' external hard drives has reached a Terabyte (that's a million million bytes).
Copies of all the photographs that comprise the digitised records are being put on these hard discs so we don't lose the data if the computers break down.
This is just the start of backing up, as it is hoped we can also get the data on CDs or DVDs which will be stored in a carefully controlled environment.
This might sound like a bad case of belts and braces, but we don't want to risk losing the hundreds of hours of work that has gone into digitisation and subsequent indexing.
Copies of all the photographs that comprise the digitised records are being put on these hard discs so we don't lose the data if the computers break down.
This is just the start of backing up, as it is hoped we can also get the data on CDs or DVDs which will be stored in a carefully controlled environment.
This might sound like a bad case of belts and braces, but we don't want to risk losing the hundreds of hours of work that has gone into digitisation and subsequent indexing.