Archiving – for safety and profit?

Many businesses have built up a vast array of videotapes, slides, photos and other media which are doing little more than taking up valuable space in their business premises. But businesses can save space and money and even repurpose this media by archiving these valuable assets into a digital media store.

In this guest article Kevin Cook explores ways that you could start to make your media generate a hitherto untapped source of income for your business.

Media archiving – part of your Spring Cleaning

At this time of the year many businesses will be thinking of spring cleaning their premises in an attempt to de-clutter and claim back some of their valuable office, filing and storage space. In many cases, a fair proportion of that space is being filled with bulky and hard to access media.

But before you start to throw away old videotapes, cassettes, films, negatives, slides etc – do you really know what’s on them? Do you still have the machines to play them back or display them – without damaging their contents? It’s probably time you started to look at the various benefits of digitising these and to create your own media archive.

Whilst it is possible to digitise your own media, many companies specialise in helping businesses with their archiving and can convert pretty much any analogue media into virtually footprint-less digital files which can be easily accessed, indexed and saved to a multitude of digital storage solutions.

Today, a single USB stick could contain several filing cabinets worth of high resolution photos, negatives and/or slides.

Comparative Media Source	USB size and the approx. amount of JPG images they can store
	1GB	4GB	8GB	32GB	128GB
High quality 6×4 colour photos	700	2,800	5,700	23,000	90,000
High quality A4 colour photos	200	800	1,600	6,500	26,000

Note: A more detailed megapixel calculation chart can be found on the Sandisk website here.

Next: taking stock of video