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Bit Rot Stalks Your Digital Keepsakes
axlrosen writes "The NYTimes has an article about the problems of digital archiving. How many of your digital memories will still be around 50 years from now, considering lost disks, incompatible formats, hard drive crashes, fading CD-Rs, etc.? Unfortunately Peter Briggs' solution won't work for most of us. The only real way to make sure that your grandkids get to see your digital photos is to make real photographic prints from them. (When I bought my Mom a digital camera I installed Picasa for her, and made sure she knows to order real prints of all the pictures she wants to survive through the ages...)"
Half of my 5.25" floppies don't work anymore!
move your stuff to the next "permanent" media
"REAL Photos" wear out too.
Short of having titanium punchcards with your data bits punched in (and even then...) you are simply going to have to keep backing up and backing up. I'd rather have my data on 2 new hard drives than a dozen decade-old ones.
That's why I still use punchcards.
What's he talkin about?? Whats the latest format to come out since the jpeg?? And who expects the tiff to go away??
use elite [kiddie] scripts to hack hundreds of co-lo servers, mount an encrypted drive, rsync all the stuff there (distributed). maintain. global distributed backups. i think you can ever buy lists of already compromised computers, too. that'd make that just a little easier.
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
--Linus Torvalds
E pluribus unum
www.bugmenot.com
But you have time to read a story on
Just remember to move to a new PC every couple of years, and back up the most important data, and you'll be fine!
I have files that are 15 years old purely because every time I move PC I copy all the data onto the new one.
My Journal
Alien v Predator script saved by Internet pirates
Amazing anaecdote from Peter Briggs, the author of the screenplay for Alien Versus Predator.
Back when I had a bunch of floppy disks and also when I had an Amiga I used to think about what I would do with all the information to keep it from degrading. I thought that someday I would write the stuff from the couple hundred floppies to a CD-R. But I never got around too it. And now I've sold my Amiga, so I'll have to buy another one.
I think the biggest problem for me is getting around to converting them from the old format to the new.
If you think about the rate of growth in storage formats, you can always beat bitrot by a couple years by storing X number of old medium on 1 of the new medium. Because the new medium is usually X+ times the size of the old.
User "gaygaygay"
Pass "gaygaygay"
Hope that helps.
I guess it's good news for at least one company.
Reg Free
AC to avoid Karma Whoreage
-OverlordQ
Haven't we seen a dozen or so articles on Slashdot alone about CDR and other bitrot? Slow news day? Or is it because its an NYT article?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I am going through similar problems right now. I have about 30 floppies containing drafts of my mother's first novel. She wrote it in the early nineties on an IBM, using some early version of wordperfect.
I decided to recover them and save the data on a CD, and I realized I didnt have a floppy drive installed on any of my machines! Somewhere in storage I had a USB floppy drive, but I cant get any software to read her files.
My solution: buy antiquated hardware.
Obnoxius people showing us photos of their kids, vacations, whatever. Digital photography just made things worse, and now they want to preserve them for eternity!!!
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia
I use Microsoft Word to print out all my MP3s, which I then store in a 3-ring binder. If I ever lose my digital copy, I can use text recognition to restore my MP3s from the paper backup.
Let's just hope there isn't a fire or a flood.
What's the quality of photo-printer paper compared to traditional photo paper? I've got old snapshots and such from sixty years ago, but will printed digital photos last that long?
-Lucas
But the main problem is not the "end of life" of media used for storage, is the format in which the information is. In 50 years, will be an application that opens/process that information? One of the advantage of having information in open formats is that in the worst case, you can have all the information to be able to process them. But if you stored your information using an applicaiton with its own propietary/closed format, and the company just decided to not support that format anymore, or just closed, you could have lost your information, even if the media where it is stored still retains it well.
The fact that digital data rarely goes from "Perfect" to "Ok" to "umm not so good" to "What is that?".. it tends to go from "Perfect" to "Gone/Maybe not gone but very expensive to retrieve," makes it's worth discussing the finer points of digital archival versus analog.
Who gives a shit? I'm 39, and too mentally ill to attract a wife, so no kids. What am I going to leave behind? A collection of snotty and angry online postings? I just want to retire early and pursue my long denied hobby of global agitation.
And why doesn't the posting preview here work reliably with Firefox?
--- Ban humanity.
Phisical Data such as paper, stone, ... will demish the more that it is handled and there is often some loss when it is copied, but you can keep it in a safe box for hundreds if not thousands of years. Digital Data is the oposit, In order for electronic digital data to survive it needs to be moved around and each copy is the same as it was before. That is why the music indrustry hates MP3 way more then copying Tapes. With MP3 each copy is as good as the first. With tapes they can only be copy only a fiew times before the quality gets really bad. And there is only a limit on how many times the master tape can be played. But Data just as long as it is moving it is more protected.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
that paper last for ever
You'll never lose those precious "home videos" or special "holiday snapshots" of you and the missus...just upload them to usenet and they'll be reposted for decades to come.
I'm pretty sure that if Paris ever loses her old video to CD-rot, she can just wait for the next month's repost.
The link ( http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/06/alien_v_preda tor_scr.html )
to the info on Peter Briggs has porn ads, for those to whom it matters.
Couldn't you have warned us?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
NO WAY! My 5 1/4 floppy of "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego" works as good as the day I got it!
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
This just smells like some not so cleverly planted ad.
I'll respond none the less... So far, I've managed to keep a good portion of my important information (writings, documents, pictures) that I want to keep around for a very long time.
While most of our pictures are slowly degrading over time. Data I've had for the last 10 years is still pretty much the same.
If its important, store it in more then one place...
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
The real issue here isn't physically storing data. The issue is, will anyone know WTF a JPEG is in 50 years, and how to read one? Or a Visio Diagram? Or a .xyz file? I was surprised at how little the article talked about the National Archives initiative to solve this very problem.
It's not like storage instantly changes formats. I have files from years back, even though I've changed hard drives many times. Just because I used to store things on 720k 3.5" floppies doesn't mean all those files are gone now (I don't own a floppy drive). When I got a new computer with a (then) gigantic 80 MB hard drive, I simply copied the floppies to my hard drive. This happens every time I upgrade. When I switch to mac from x86/winxp a little over a year ago, I brought my files with me then.
All this talk of digital obsolescence seems a little to chicken little to me. Practically, for most folks, this should not be a problem. Chances are, your next computer will be able to read mediea from 1 generation back. If you get so out of touch that you cannot copy the files, its your fault.
-Seth
Kazaa? :)
Bittorrent?
they all work amazingly well
This isn't really true- people use their grandparents photographs as an example, but their grandparents photographs were black and white prints on high quality acid-free paper. Colour negatives also start to deteriorate within a few years.
Unless you're using very high paper it's chances of being guaranteed for more than 30 years are low.
Worst BBC News Stories
Moving information to new media is relatively easy, the real trouble will come with obsolete file formats. The best way around this is to archive your images in formats that are likely to be supported for the rest of time. Got images? Jpeg's are going to be around forever. Got a novel? Straight text or HTML will be around forever.
Dont save things in proprietary formats, especially from small companies. I would even hesitate saving important images as PSD's, or at the very least, save a couple versions of important files.
Depending on what you are doing, there are easy way to batch convert files.
Posting links that require login isn't particularly new. Do you complain about them EVERY time they're posted?
Use http://www.bugmenot.com/
Thank me later.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Obvious - get your digital shots you cherish printed onto long lasting material.
The kind of quality that could last 500 years !
DOH
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Assuming that your great-grandchildren are going to be interested your vacation pictures fifty years from now (snigger), it is more important to make sure that the pictures are labeled or otherwise documented somehow (Anyone know who that is? I think it's your great-aunt Katherine, or is it Sue. When was that taken..?).
Proverbs 21:19
Googling for amstrad emulator brings up several thousand links. Sounds like another perfectly viable reason to release obsolete OS'es and CMOS designs to the public domain. Aside from wholly altruistic reasons, there might be some good money in it.
Of course, I am not an Amstrad expert and for all I know they could have winchester drives in them..
If you're sending your prints to a service bureau that uses a LightJet or other system to print on Fuji Crystal archival, or Kodak's equivalent, you're comparing apples to apples. They're silver halide photo papers, but the service uses a digital process to render light onto the photo paper instead of shining light through a bit of film.
[
I don't think the basement really qualifies as being a separate house. I mean, what if the whole place goes up in flames?
The submitter lets his mother run windows!
Really, what kind of son are you??
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Sounds like FUD put out by Kodak, or maybe Epson, and not "news".
Photos, slides and negatives don't last forever, just one look at the slides my Dad had in his house in Hawaii will illustrate that. But moving them to a new form of media is a lot more cumbersome moving 5 CD-Rs to a single DVD.
"Printing" is a bad way to save a picture, inkjet printouts degrade faster than true photos. You'd need to output to a real photo to get the same lifespan as a photo. Oh, and if you do, keep the digital copy, it's going to be better than a scan of the photo that's been sitting on the mantel.
Are there many consumers out there with more than 120GB of family digital photos? A spare hard drive is cheap these days as an additional place to store a copy.
Want to have your photos at home as well as somewhere safe in case of fire? It would be pricy to made dupes of all your slides or photos, but a second set of CDs pretty cheap.
There might be people who saved digital photos on floppys ( like those who got the cheesy Sony floppy cam ), but that media is not opsolete yet and for $20 you can have a USB floppy drive to let you move them to a CD.
Old media meant that the cost of the dupe was pretty much the same cost of the original. This doesn't lend itself to redundant copies at multiple locations for most people. Digital lends itself to duplication, just ask any movie pirate.
There are films from the 20's that are lost forever. Thanks to DVD pirates, we have enough redundant copies of Star Wars that it will never be gone.
...we better stop using matter-based storage. Apparently, protons fade in sunlight and may have limited lifespan with no implied warranty! And no galactic best buys exist to extend it.
As time goes on, space increases, bandwidth increases, etc. The data gradually migrates from one to the other.
Who cares if my CD-Rs are knackered in 20 years time? It'll all be on a tiny corner of a hard disk or equivalent, on the network, in Open file formats....
Stick Men
Does this make the case for parity archiving?
Damien
Why is it these articles come out every 2-3 weeks, other than to cause panic.
Also every 2-3 weeks, we hear how how forensic techniques make it impossible to destroy data once it has been recorded -- also to cause panic.
I remember one that suggested the only way to truly destroy digital data so it couldn;'t be recovered was to break the hard drive into pieces with a sledge, and then heat the remains in a cauldron until the glass platters melted.
So which is it? Is data easily destroyed or is it not?
That was hardly worth saving.
It depends on manufacturer and how much you are willing to spend on it. HP prints last around 70 years on their latest printers and ink. Cannon has decent life as well. The more spend the better the quality.
Sending your digital prints to a specialty place for development may last longer. I know my family has prints from the early 1900's that still look good.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I store my data on redundant arrays of disks in two geographical locations (my house and my parents' house, synced nightly via rsync).
Do you run rsync with --delete? If not, how do you deal with moved files? If so, how do you deal with accidental deletion?
I grant that you've solved the decaying media problem, but I've lost more data to screwups than to bitrot.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Google News
It's the article with the picture of a guy holding a cd wallet.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Prints are not the answer. They're a dead-end medium. Computer make perfect digital copies, your master copies must remain on a digital storage device.
I have 4 hard drives in my system. When I upgrade a hard drive, I copy everything from the old drive to the new one. I also do my own little RAID with important directories such as my photographs and MP3s, by copying them to another drive.
I still have files and programs from DOS days on my hard drive(s), but that's not a storage problem because drives keep getting bigger and bigger, and older programs are tiny by comparison to new ones.
Name your important files versions of "blonde britney nude sex pics crack warez pr0n.mpeg" submit them to P2P app of choice, and they will outlive anything!
I was wondering the exact same thing. Epson claim "archival quality" for their recent photo printers, but don't state what this means.
I called them and they said "25 years". Ironically, the non-photo pigment ink printers (C84 etc.) are rated for 100 years.
Here's a Better Link
:)
Sorry about that.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Not necessarily. The Amstrad in question may have been a PCW. These had 3" floppies.
I discovered Picasa a few months ago, and I really love it. It's the best massive photo collectio browser I've run across yet for Windows.
If only there was a similar application for Linux, or... better yet for the web.
Also, be aware that when trying to save printouts of pictures, that printouts from comsumer inkjet printers *do* fade over time.
CNet/News.com frequently mirrors NYTimes here
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
If you're sending your prints to a service bureau that uses a LightJet or other system to print on Fuji Crystal archival, or Kodak's equivalent, you're comparing apples to apples. They're silver halide photo papers
Yeah, I know that and you know that, but noone else I know does. They print on an inkjet and assume it will last like a daguerreotype. They don't backup either.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do what you can to get these files copied to CDR and HD. Hire a college student to debug the file format and convert to RTF or other current format. (I did that a long time ago to convert a directories of Olivetti typewriter files to RTF -- it worked ok for small files)
Well, you'll just have to wait 60 years to see, won't you?
This is nothing new, and has been affecting people for many years already.
/dev/null, and so the ability to view these discs was rapidly diminishing as people got rid of the specialist readers, and the BBC micros...
:-)
The BBC, to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday book by creating a new version (and making a program about it).
This project's output was a laser disc that required a BBC micro (ask your grandad) and a special reader to decode... In the spirit of portability, it seems that the original documentation describing all formats used was consigned to
Thankfully, someone did something about.
The full article is an interesting read, and the warning is there for everyone to see...
Hopefully people will learn from such experiences, but would you bet on it?
Cheers,
Nick.
What if you could give up 1GB of space towards a distributed backup service, creating a massive network-RAID-like thingy (not to be too technical here)? Might work for a reasonable quantity of heirloom media. . .
Pick a sheet of paper and print the image as 1s and 0s. Then microfliche the output
...too mentally sane to attract a wife.
As far as file formats go I don't anticipate any problems as long as you stay with mainstream formats of your time.
No doubt that in a century from now no photos, videos, or music will ever be stored in any kind of lossy format. However I believe there will always be backwards compatibility or a means to convert things like JPG, MPG, and MP3 even though they are from "ancient" times.
As for the actual physical storage medium, that might be a problem if nobody is there to update it every decade.
I have three categories that I put data into, that I've decided to call Red, Yellow and Green.
Red data is the most important and irreplacable -- things like financial data, things I've written, important emails, family videos, etc.
Yellow data is not as important, but would be in inconvenience to replace -- things like purchased software, esoteric software drivers, etc.
Green data is data that I like to have on hand but that could be easily replaced or that are updated frequently -- things like Linux distributions, freeware, etc.
For the Red data, I create PAR2 parity files and burn 3 copies (with the PAR2 data). One is stored at home, one at work and one in a safety deposit box. Sensative data (like financial data) is encrypted with a key located in the deposit box.
For the Yellow data, I burn 2 copies. One is stored at home and the other at work.
For the Green data, I burn 1 copy.
I will still need to keep an eye on the Red data and check the copies once every year or two, perhaps reburning to the most current technology, but I feel fairly confident that this data is safe, having three copies in different geographic locations, each with redundant parity files (with 10-20% redundancy) that can be used to reconstruct damaged data.
YMMV. Hopefully my scheme works; I haven't had any catastrophic events that affect my data yet.
That color photographs on most paper will be badly faded in 50 years. The processes that won't fade fast are pretty expensive, and you probably have to find a specialty place to make them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
1) Put a picture of a naked chick in the background of all your photos.
2) Put photos on the internet.
In a few days, your photos will be archived on and available on digital and print media throughout the globe, and will never disappear until mankind goes the way of the dodo.
- rouftop
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
Is there a service where you can copy your color negatives to three b/w negatives, one for each color layer, so they can be recombined later to make a full color image? This strikes me as the best long-term analog solution to losing precious color pictures.
Excuse me while I put on my tinfoil hat to entertain a creepy possibility for a moment.
M$ is putting Digital Restrictions Management into Windows. Most people use Windows, and most people are not very clued-up about computers in general (e.g. what a file is, what a file format is etc.).
Now, suppose a mass-market digital camera maker were to bring out very cheap digital cameras with a proprietary image format, and were to get Microsoft to Digitally-Restrict the saving of the files on the PeeCee's hard disk in some way (file size, image quality, number of images, none at all without paying a fee)...
Stick Men
I've not read the article but, from the summary, I agree with the problems of digital media storage. The author however, and many others, seem to ignore the issues with analog storage.
Sure fire, water, shredding/mutilation, and just plain aging affect both paper and electronic storage. The big difference is that with digital, you can have multiple originals since each copy is an exact duplicate. Yes, you can duplicate photos and documents, but each duplication is different from the original and from each other at least slightly; even two different prints from the same negative have differences due to the grain structure of the print paper. The core effect is that a photo print has a finite lifetime and can not be renewed indefinitely.
Digital information on the other hand can be stored in a manner where some destruction is a recoverable situation. You can also copy digital information to a new medium without any loss of information. As technologies become obsolete, you can transcode old information to new formats with little or no data loss.
If I were an archeologist, I think I'd rather be digging up hard disks and DVDs full of data than worn down stone tablets and decomposed parchments scrolls.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
There are already a number of companies that handle and store archived digital data, data warehousing it's called I believe, for corporations and the gov't. I imagine that once it becomes a need for the average consumer, we'll hear about it.
R(k)
I hope this isn't redundant already, but I thought The Long Now Library discussion of this topic was pretty good.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
WTF? Did you even read the article? There is certainly loss in digital formats - there's risk of corruption of the media that the format is stored in.
The music industry hates MP3s because they reduce their revenue, not because each copy is the same as it was before. Tapes are obsolete, and I'm sure they hated people copying tapes back in the day too. It's trivial to copy a CD without using MP3s also... I really don't think your argument holds.
I don't think your setup would prevent against a nuclear attack. :-)
I use a 4.6 GB Magneto Optical drive for my critical stuff... The drive was had relatively inexpensively on ebay, and so was the media. Here is an overview of the technology for anyone who is unaware:
c al_technology.htm
http://www.pctechguide.com/16storage_Magneto-Opti
Bacially the disks are magnetic, but only affected by magnetism when they are heated with a laser. The disk is also contained within a hard plastic case which protects the disk very well.
Random bit of trivial... In the Mission Impossible movie with Tom Cruise, they used MO's to trasfer thew data they were getting...
Same here. So far I haven't seen or heard of a satisfactory backup solution.
Well, mind rot makes sure that I don't remember to miss any of those "keepsakes".
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
> "2) I don't have the time to sign up " /. and post a reply??
>> But you have time to read a story on
You must be new here.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Hey, if information does indeed (as it seems) contain some sort of anti-entropic power, force or energy, it stands to reason that, entropy being what it is, if you don't maintain it it will decay. May the process releases some kind of particle, otherwise the universal capacity for information would eventually be used up. And why? Because you insisted on uploading your stupid collection of 10 million animated gifs to the super-stable diamond disks in that giant automated space station.
On a less speculative note, my observation is that in most if not all cases, one has the alternative to upgrade their data to more viable formats - the people who have problems are those who refuse to abandon software formats whose time has come. If your data is important enough that the thought of losing it bothers you inordinately, then by all means manage it. But try to remember that the sun WILL eventually expand to engulf the earth.
(My 1956 paperback copy of The Critique of Pure Reason - purchased used for $1.50 - still works just fine, incidentally...)
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I'm storing my pictures on 3 different hard drives: one where my website is hosted (and where my friends can access my pictures), one on my laptop (since I use it to download the pictures from the camera) and one at my office.
:-)
Now I'm burning CD's with the pictures I care most, but I intend to do some DVD's of them all.
Unless all HD and the CD's storing sites are striked at once, or the technology changes in such a way that I cannot access my data anymore, I think I'll be safe (of course, noone but me is taking care of my pictures, so if I die, they'd probably fade -- that's why I'll soon have children, so they can be ubergeeks and take care of daddy's data
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
before we bought a digitial camera and dispensed with old fashioned prints. So, I copied my employer's data retention plan, changed a few things and, voila, we have a digital camera now :). \
Now, where can I get a few terabytes of disk and tape storage cheap?
I just have to say, as a formally trained photographer, anyone who thinks color prints will last 100 years are dead wrong. The caustic nature of the chemistry used in traditional color printing, especially your typical drugstore-type one-hour photos, pretty much guarantees the utter destruction of the prints within a few years.
Hand-printed black and white paper can be much more archival - the medium lends itself to it. BUT it is still highly dependent on the process, care and storage of the prints. You must store them in acid-free environments, out of direct sunlight, etc etc.
I have a degree in photography and emphasized on archival techniques and I STILL have issues with color photographs that have degraded in 10 short years. Take that fwiw.
hmmm they look like normal 3.5" floppies.
Ever tried reading an IBM 5.25" floppy in an Apple II or vice versa, or reading an IBM 3.5" floppy in a Mac or vice versa before the high-density drive came out in the middle of the Mac SE's lifetime? At the time, different brands of computers wrote data to floppies using different and incompatible modulation techniques, let alone file systems. This is why there's the Catweasel floppy disk controller, which can understand more modulations than the typical PC FDC can.
Here is TFA, courtesy of bugmenot.com.
Even Digital Memories Can Fade
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: November 10, 2004
The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work." Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for digital preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with "a deluge of digital information," had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digital material so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardware or software being used. The assumption is that machines and software formats in use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.
"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals," said Ken Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives and Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3½-inch diskettes, even the larger 5¼-inch floppy disks from the 1980's. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD's and other backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD's and hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed to extremes in humidity or temperature.
And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become unusable. Unlike, say, faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital file becomes corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.
"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.
Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate materials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trapped in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they are forced to devise their own stop-gap measures, most of them unwieldy, inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.
Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he was in elementary school, Mr. Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail since college.
Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.
Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like CD's and DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward
I thought this guy was New Here.
Its actually not a bad idea. A number of 3rd party sites will host your digital images fer free.
I use Shutterfly, they store unlimited images for free and let you share them too
I asked their customer support, they have uber-redundant backups
and they don't claim to 'own' your images either which is nice
I just constantly delete my data! Why waste my time trying to save what will ultimately get lost anyway!
All you losers are wasting your time!
When the big switch from CD-R to DVD-R came, I backed up all my 5+ year old CD-R's at 6-7 per DVD. Side benefits: throw out a bunch of unused crap, reorganize, save physical space. And I don't see this changing--whatever technology is next, I'll be backing up my data DVD's to it (again, a bunch of them per whatever the new media will be in a year or two). I don't see this as an inconvenience--on the contrary, you never feel like you're collecting crap in your attic and your data is fresh. So, disc-rot is a non-issue IMO.
storage bandwidth/throughput is really the issue here. If you can't transfer as fast or faster than the storage media decay you have a problem. Otherwise, you can just keep transferring to newer media like you suggested.
HAND.
The simple solution is software RAID, and possibly scheduled backups. Maybe not for consumers yet, but certainly for the technically inclined. A 200 GB hard drive can be had for $80. An average 3 MP photo is ~500kb, so such a drive could hold 400,000 digital photos. Mirror this data onto another drive, perhaps back it up occasionally, and you have a fairly foolproof way to keep the data indefinitely.
Inexpensive storage media has been outpacing the size of the media files for a while now. Digital video will be a bump in the road, but that will even out as well. Unarchived data is a recipe for disaster, but archiving has become quite easy and practical using commodity hardware.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
I have lost a good bit of data over the years and it really isn't all that bad. I am guilty of hoarding files I never intended to get rid of but after losing them, it really didn't matter to me. I think a lot of us keep files around because we think they COULD have a use in the future or maybe we just have some sentimental attachment to them but the truth of the matter is we will probably never use those files again. I think of files I have backed up to CDs and then realize the last time I touched the CDs... when I made them. Just like most garages get piled up with crap, so do our harddrives; it is too bad we can't hold a sort of data sale for all of our precious relics.
Just my 2 pennies
There's a photo shop in the mall around me that can take all or most digital media containers and print out only the prints you want. If you want more than eight or so pictures, it's something like 1/3 the cost of doing it on my home printer.
And they have 1/2 hour delivery, so they'd be done by the time you meander to the opposite end of the mall and back. For true convenience, there's internet sites that allow you to upload your pictures for printing, then they mail them to you.
I don't read AC A human right
For those of you who really need permant storage, drop whatever you want preserved into a black hole. The gravational waves produced will carry information (heavily encrypted!) into eternity...
Retrival may be a challenge.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Punchcards are making a comeback
Lots of people are wondering why people would buy an iPod photo.
One option they have is to have the iPod copy original photo files instead of just reduced sized ones. You can't see the original images using the iPod, they sit in a directory - which seems odd at first glance.
But If you think about it, it make a perfect photo backup device for the average consumer who might otherwise have problems figuring out a decent backup solution. I think the "Originals" folder shows up at the top level when you mount it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We take hundreds of digital pix of my son all the time. Most of them are throw-aways. Who really cares what happens to the rest? He's not going to care about the photos when he's middle-aged any more than I care about the photos sitting in his grandparent's attic. Truly important stuff will be taken care of by people who care about it. All the rest is just a challenge for future anthropologists.
This "all my shit is important" attitude is one of the most annoying aspects of the "blog phenomenon." Who really gives a shit about what crap oozes out of your head? Seriously.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
WTF? Did you even read my reply let me elaberate.
Yea if you backup the data to CD/Harddrive/Tape... and leave it there. But if you keep the data moving from one meadia to the other so if one failes you replace the medea and use a new one so the data will last forever. But if you make copies of your picture and pass it and copy it again you will get a quality loss.
MP3 Reduce Revenue because the quality is is the same. Yes they did hate people copying tapes back then but it was more tolerated then MP3 because the Quality is still there for every copy of the data. MP3 allow an Expotentional form of sharing the data you send to 2 people each of the 2 people send to 2 other people... With CD-CD you usually copy to 2 people and that is about it. Because it takes more time to Burn and Distribute a CD then to copy an MP3 into an email or P2P program. Also if the CDs have major scrateches on them from repeted use the quality of the CD copies will reduce do to ware of the origional. Physial Data wares out after use. Electronic Data that is being moved around stays active.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The 'pigment' based printers have always had longer archival times due to the nature of the ink. It doesn't 'dye' the paper, it embeds little bits of colored junk. Unfortunately, the color gamut of pigment inks is not as good as dye-based inks, so people often complain that prints with pigment based inks look flat and don't have the 'pop' that dye-based ones do.
Epson produced a professional pigment based photo printer a few years ago (Model 2000P, if I recall correctly). The prints from it supposedly always looked muddied, and it didn't sell well.
And when Andromeda collides with our Galaxy, rips it to bits and turns it into an active elliptical flooded with radiation - WHAT THEN???
And when the stars go out - WHAT THEN???
And when the protons decay - WHAT THEN???
And when the black holes eat everything - WHAT THEN???
And when the black holes fart themselves to death - WHAT THEN???
And when the distance between two average particles (probably two neutrinos hovering just abopve absolute zero) equals some vast multiple of the size of our present universe - WHAT THEN???
Where ya gonna store all your pr0n then? Eh???
But these bits of data and the illusions of metaphysics are things we cling to like some crack addled freak stumbling about the galaxy looking for some cheap gas.
Me? I print out the text stuff and keep it in my file cabinet, the video I print to tape and have on a drive, and the audio is kept on two different drives.
RS RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I make a backup of everything important once a year and take copy to my parents and the cottage. I take an incremental backup with me anytime I go visiting.
My kids will have bigger computers and any digital photos will just live on by being on their computers. And their grandkids computers and ...
Recently one of my aunts scanned in and touched all my grandmothers photo album. Now that album lives on CD and Hard-Drives of most of her 13 kids and 35 grandkids. Now nobody really cares who gets the original album.
Digital medium is SOLVING the problem of the loss of this type of heirloom data -- not introducing a problem.
Oh boy, a field day for the /.ers that have been squirreling away all that "obsolete" hardware. Quit running Linux servers on those machines, boys! They'll be too valuable when Kinkos is ready to buy those "antiques"!
I knew I should've held on to my Apple II...
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
Simple, keep multiple online copies using something like rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org].
:)
Great, now I have to go rewrite my backup scripts....
Thanks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There already are.
If you figure that most people's data is under a gig. We're not talking about system images here, just the "my documents folder" and it's ilk. Less than a hundred megs/month with most people, including photographs, unless they really love their mpeg home movies.
With decent broadband and some system to do the backups during non-peak hours, you can easily do tens gigabytes a month. Will it cost? Yes, but it's like doing your own car repairs. Unless you have a garage equiped like the shop, they can do it quicker and easier than you. Is it worth paying $20 a month for not having to worry about backups for a couple hours a month, would you seriously consider it at $20/year?
2nd paid advert for "web backup" on google
I don't read AC A human right
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
I have about 30 floppies containing drafts of my mother's first novel. She wrote it in the early nineties on an IBM, using some early version of wordperfect.
[...]
I cant get any software to read her files.
You can still download the WordPerect 5.1/DOS convert utility which enables WordPerfect formats as far back as version 4.2 and up to 5.1 to be converted to various other formats (including plain vanilla text if none of the other options are usable any more). If your mother was advanced enough to have WP 6, it should still be readable with newer WP versions or with MS Word at least at the Office 97 level.
-wb-
You're not allowed to back up your hard drive any more. Read your EULAs.
On it's original media, even! My second PC was, luckily, a Mac 512K. I've still got the system disks for it, with the original MacPaint and MacWrite disks. I've still got the first doodle I've done in MacPaint on 3.5" 400K diskette, and my PowerMac 6100/60 still reads it fine. When my all-singing, all-dancing Linux-based windows/appletalk/NFS/novell server is up and running, I'm going to back up everything onto RAID, then optical. As long as I keep cycling backup strategies, and keep offsite backups in a safety deposit box, all my data should be secure for quite a long time...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I used to store all my important information using a large set of abaci, but then we had that earthquake ... and ... I'm sorry, but that event still gets me all emotional.
This is not my sig.
Digital vs analog isn't the real issue here. Imagine I have a magnetic cassette tape with a some songs on it. It may decay, or the whole thing may be wiped out by an errant magnet. Now imagine the data is on that tape in a digital framed format with multiple redundancy. Now when any redundant section become corrupt, a new copy can be made. And something that wipes out all redundant copies of a frame wipes only that frame. So that's for decay. As for the magnet, they're both completely unrecoverable.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I guess all the true geeks have left Slashdot. For they would know that if you want something to truly last beyond 50 years in digital form you need to us Magneto Optical media. You can get 2.3 gig 3.5" drives from Fujitsu or if you go to 5.25" drives, you can get them more than twice as large. The media is stable, in a cartridge to protect it and the drives are backwards compatible with all capacity disks ever made. At least this holds true for Fujitsu, but I think it is a manadatory part of the spec to be able to claim the device is an MO device. Yeah, you can't go to Best Buy or Fry's to buy one, but how hard is it to find them on the web or ebay and order one up. If you really want to keep your data around, you need one of these. Not some crappy CDR or DVDR drive.
d =3
http://www.buyfcpa.com/searchresults.asp?search_i
The major downside was that it used a very unusual disk form factor: 3" - while the rest of the world standardized on 3.5"
Storing data for the long term has always been a problem. Data carved in stone or clay tablets will over time be worn away. Great works on scolls of paper are lost. Cave painitngs fade and canvas degenerates. Granted those mediums held up well, but are more difficult reproduce historically. Considering the relative ease and speed of copying and moving data from format to format in contemporary mediums permanence should be achieved through propagation. Each copy may have a short life compared to illuminated manuscripts or italian frescoes, but it takes comparatively little to burn the Library of Congress to dvd in comparison.
Sure - you just have to physically destroy ALL copies of the data. So it just depends on your ability to get your hands on every single copy.
If you have everything on a HD, destroying the platter(s) itself is enough. For CD/DVD's, zapping them for a few seconds in a microwave (fun!) ought to do it. But if you have written some popular software, or a naked picture of your girlfriend got posted on /. - forget it, it'll be around somewhere till the end of your days.
It's fun to think of data lifecycle as total number of copies around. Take popular OS, say Windows 95. Before release, somewhere in 1994, only beta's/previews. Then, at some point, it 'goes gold'. A couple of masters, then more for reproduction, and weeks or months after that, millions of copies. After some years, all over the world, tens or hundreds of millions of computer uses have a copy, or know someone that does. A couple of years later, new OS version, computers/HD's get trashed, CD's are stuffed away or land in the garbage. Number of total copies drops, and many years later, maybe only some enthousiasts, or computer museum still have a copy. Special language versions disappear first, and maybe, some day, THE last copy of Win95 gets lost/destroyed? Who knows....
In general, the more unique the data is, and the more difficult/impossible it would be to re-create, the more careful you should be with remaining copies.
They don't build them like they used to...
.5% or whatever.
The old silver photographs were more carefully done than many today, but you have to consider that even then a large number of photos were taken, and most destroyed over time. And how do you know that it wasn't "super clear" back in 1870?
If you think about it, what 18/19th century houses are still surviving? It's pretty much the best
I don't read AC A human right
Adding to potential future despair, the proprietary 'raw' image formats coming from medium- to high-end cameras these days have a much higher potential for bitrot, since most of such formats are closed.
We can reasonably expect to still have software which can read, oh, say, TIFF and JPEG in the future due to their massive proliferation, but who is to say that Adobe Photoshop v.19 will still have a ~2004-era Canon RAW import tool.
I do believe that Adobe has proposed an open TIFF extension to encapsulate RAW images. I would hope that such a thing would take off.
I have digital data lying around since 1976, that's 24 years, I have my first digital photos and everything. Granted I have lost some data , but this is from having to move around for work and things like physical theft (I had a filing cabinet of floppy's stolen in 1987).
.img files from Turbo Pascal or my old easywriter and multimate doc's.
I have understood from day one that tapes and disks are of a limited life span. And make many copy's all over the place.
Every time I upgrade my main work computer I copy the old disk to the new. and keep the old drive in storage. I did't this from 5 meg, to 10 meg, to 20meg to 40 meg, to 80 meg, to 120meg, to 200 meg, to 500 meg, to 800 meg, to 1 gig, to 4 gig, to 9 gig, to 20 gig, to 60 gig, to 100 gig, to 200 gig, and now to 1 TB. For both my main usix and Windows/Dos drives. My windows disk had on C:
a C:\C\C\C\C\C\C\C directory with each succesive complete image of the previous system I had been working on.
I also use redundant tape backups and have spent the time to transfer everything over to CD-R and later DVD-R as well as keep much of it online at all times.
I have found some bit rot where files are corrupted, but have made some crude scripts to do MD5 checksums way back and now this allows me to reconstruct complete sets originals files from several faulty sources.
I have even restored all my VAX source from ½ inch 9 track reel to reel tapes that the oxide has turned into gummy stick gunk.
Maintaining these archives is time consuming and required for though to make checksums and many backups.
My largest problem till recently has been a lack of storage space to keep everything. Media and square footage in the Garage.
But thanks to things like DVD-R and 250Gig Maxtor Drives this hasn't been a problem any longer.
And they even have 200Gig Worm Drives.
So maybe I'm a bit of a packrat, but thinks like the Unix Locate command, and having it under cygwin has been priceless.
Now if I only had tools to read my old
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
...to carve your data into rock using hieroglyphs. That should give a lifespan of around a few thousand years at least. Should even withstand earthquakes, extremes of heat and cold, and maybe even having your city sacked by those pesky Assyrians.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I don't remember if it was the LoC, BBC, PBS, or who (was some big archive, tho) who had this pile of old media that they had a hell of a time finding anything to read.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Domesday Project in the UK in the eighties, in which the BBC collaborated with schools to create a modern version of the original Domesday book created in the twenty years after 1066 (William the Conqueror wanted a full audit of what he had won). It was a huge project, and used laser discs to store the vast (for the time) amounts of data. The irony came less than twenty years later, when they were scrambling to find hardware that could still read the discs, so that it could be re-archived before the discs degraded. Meanwhile, the original Domesday Book, on paper, is still as legible as it was when it was created almost a thousand years ago.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
A negative or print has orders of magnitude more information intrinsically stored in the pigments than digital photos have stored in bits. If you really wanted to, you could print out a coded transcript of the digital photo in a sort of bar code/dot code, or put it in some more durable medium than photo paper, all without altering the data.
In fact, you can do a better job, because the information can be spread around. With photos, a scratch or mark will wipe out the local redundancy entirely. And of course, photo archives won't help you at all with non-image data types.
Perhaps the most fascinating way of combatting bit rot is parity checking and repair. Even if you lose a whole chunk of the file, if you have an equivalent amount of data in a parchive you can repair it completely.
Really, what we need are filesystems with built in mechanisms for backing up key data. For instance if you flag a directory or file to be backed up, it automatically generates backups and parchives and stores them in as many separate locations as possible. If you did it right, even if you erased or formatted the whole disk, you could still retrieve the critical data from standardized locations as long as it wasn't written over.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I just memorise all the bits.
My 21,000 digital photos (yes, really) are backed up onto CDR media every year for pictures taken during the year, and placed into a bank safe deposit box. This year I plan to bring the entire collection back for a few days and restore it ALL to disk, and then back up again to fresh CDR's.
:)
Along with those backups, my main photo server is backed up weekly, and my Gallery Server holds all the photos I publish to the world as well, and it's backed up weekly too.
I've lost the main photo hard drive before, and I was lucky enough to have a recent enough backup that I didn't lose all but some trivial photos.
I was lucky enough to come across a spiffy Compaq ML370 surplus from my work, so I'm planning on setting up a raided drives to provide better protection as well.
Yes, I'm a little paranoid about my pictures.
Don't real photos also rot? Sure, they look okay at 50 years, but how about 100?
I just make up a RAR file of all the stuff I need archive until the end of time, and then name it something like "Deep Throat XXX deleted scenes, ULTRA-RARE (CSG_SD YYYY.MM.DD).RAR", where YYYY.MM.DD is the current year.month.day.
The way most downloaders are, they NEVER delete anything, even if it's totally bogus (Most don't even seen to check what they've downloaded)
Now, all my great grandkids need to know is that they need to look for my old clan nickname (CSG_SD), and they'll find photos and videos galore on whatever that generations P2P network is.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Because it is easy (trivially easy in fact) to make completely accurate copes of your data. You just keep copying it to new formats. I have data on my new Serial ATA drive that was orignally on 3.5" floppy. That got copied to an 170MB IDE hadrrive years ago and has since been copied from drive to drive. For data that I worry about it, I keep it in more than one place.
Also, there seems to be this obsession with saving all data. Why? Most of the data we generate is crap. One of the nice thigns about digital data is it gives us the ability to generate more data and sift through it to get what we want. In the past, if you want to take pictures of an event, you'd take one or two rolls of film. With a digital camera, it's easy to shoot 1000 photos. I know plenty of people with high end ones that ALWAYS shoot in burst mode to get a better chance of getting a good picture. Most fo that data gets thrown away, but who cares?
namely my brain!
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Just keep your data re-circulating in the transporter pattern buffers. If you run low on dilithium use scotch or, in a pinch, a wee dram of Psorian brandy.
Aye, works like a charm and keeps for 200 years or more.
Bah. This is sensationalist media. We all know about how fragile media is, and how the original claims of 200 year archival life weren't quite correct. If you really care about your content, you'll have multiple copies (possibly on different media types) in different locations. You'll refresh the media as new technology comes out (i.e. CDR->DVDR->Blu-Ray, etc). Problem solved (probability of data remaining is very high). If you just burn a disc then leave it in your car for a decade, you'll get what you deserve.
As for printing: professional printing will last a while, but look at pictures from 50 years ago (or 100). Not always holding up so well now, eh? Inkjet prints will do worse.
So... digital copies will obviously outlast if and only if you preserve and maintain them properly.
...Blah. Once someone leaks the inner workings of black holes your so-called heavy encryption is gone! If black holes only were based on open standards...
;)
I've heard of real methods to print out binary data on paper. It's like those fancy barcodes that shipping companies use -- the ones that look like a block of dots rather than bars. I've even heard that by coloring them, you can get surprisingly high density.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you want your pictures of any sort to last, go here
They archive your digital pictures on redundant hard drives and burn gold archival CD's that are stored off-premises.
They also make top quality archival prints and hard-bound albums.
And they scan your existing photos, and can retouch and restore them.
Big Disclaimer! This is my company! So I'm biased. But photographic preservation and archiving is my business, so if that's what you want, please take a look at all we can do!
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Hey... my C64 used a tape drive that you could back up/read to and from...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
It has only been in the last year or two, as anyone involved in the industry knows, that truly archive ink jet materials became available.
Currently a color digital print can perform exactly as well as a color photographic process print.
The real question though is, can you keep a "digital negative" in as good a shape for as long as a film negative?
The answer is "yes", if you actively maintain that digital negative and "probably not" if you just let that 8in floppy you stored it on sit in the closet for 75 years...
But in a way, that perfectly mirrors what really happens to photographs and negative in the real world anyway. Tons of photos and negatives get thrown away every day because the person currently in charge of them just doesn't care about them any more.
I just inhereted a huge box of ancient photos collected an passed down in our family, most of the older photos are compeltely un-lableld and there are no negatives. A lot of them are severely faded and would require a ton of work to restore. Besides, I have no idea who they are and never will, furthermore, I have no descendants and no-one to pass this heap of history along to, so when I die, they will more than likely just be thrown away.
Bottom line: If someone cares, "digital negatives" will survive. If they don't, then they won't. In reality, exactly like film. We have already lost a ton of film history because of this.
The article was mostly a hype piece. It's your data, take care of it or don't. The end results depend on you, not any magical, impossible, "permanent" storage or printing process.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Mouse cable; Keyboard cable; Monitor cable; PSU cable; (Ethernet cable).
That's not a great deal of wiring / rewiring.
Even if it's an old PC system you'll have the necessary peripherals available even if you need an odd connector or two AT->PS2 etc and even those are hardly expensive. I'm not that old but I am grateful for the huge fall in the cost of storage thanks to the Moore's law-esque upholding advances in technology. I've got HDD space to spare that was, in living memory, unheard of in mainframes. I've got a DVD burner that is capable of storing many, many times the size of my first hard drive.
So you've got an old 'bin' PC. Copy your crap over and quit whining - you've never had it so good.
They have the 2200 now. It looks beautiful, better than any consumer level photo printer, but it's also over $1000. I believe it's a pigment-based, as it's supposed to be one of their best for long-lasting prints.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
My friend Tom owns a photo archiving company called The Family Reserve. He offers digital archiving, color correction, and restoration services, specializing in family photo albums.
isn't worth the paper it's printed on... for one, you've got to keep your original receipt... and secondly, the only remedy you get when the disc fails is a replacement blank disc... whatever was on the disc and has gone is gone... they won't compensate you for the loss of the data at all. So if it's the disc with the baby pictures on it and it was the only disc with them on and they've gone... tough.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
(actually, I make a point of keeping multiple copies of my entire digital photo collection)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Offsite backups are the only safe way to protect against floods, burglars, fires and similar acts of god.
Whether you're using film or floppies, they won't last too long in a fire, bomb, or disgruntled-girlfriend-pissed-at-the-pictures-of-t he-previous-girlfriend.
I do exactly what the poster suggested, with my home computer synced with my web-hosting provider nightly. I'm using rsync to keep about 1/3 TB (a few meg change daily) each night; and it only takes minutes.
Yes, yes. There the insane ones.. Why wouldn't women date guys like us? High IQ's, steady paychecks, dashingly good looks from 200 yards, No noticable odors from 300 yards, ego's the size of large cities. Man I tell you, I am this close to cloning myself , but switching the sex to female. Yeah, that would show them. That would show them All.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
No 7 track tapes or punch cards (all formats, not just 80 column)? Newbie... :)
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I have yet to have any stored data on them go bad.
However, if you are willing to take a more active approach to archiving, there are better ways to do it. For example, store photos on CD or DVD. Make sure you have two or three copies, stored in different locations.
Every couple of years, take each copy, read it (verifying with a checksum that it is fine), and burn a new copy (and verify the new copy). At each location, and add the new copy to the same location. (If space is a concern, you only need to keep the last two good copies at each location). If a copy has errors, replace it with a copy made from one of the good ones.
This will catch bit-rot, unless all your copies go bad at the same time.
If CD or DVD (or whatever format you are using) looks like it is getting obsolete, so that new readers and writers are not readily available, you can switch formats.
This procedure will easily keep your digital data safe and readable indefinitely.
Simply upload your digital photos to GMail. Even if you delete your account, the images will remain available indefinitely. :)
Adobe has a free converter that reads just about any kind of RAW file and can output DNG (the Adobe RAW standard). They've opened the spec so have at it!!
Luckly there is also DCRaw, which does an OK job of processing most RAW files as well. You could include the source for that (single C source file) on any CD with RAW files to future-proof the collection.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Someone's thought about this issue and proposes a solution: http://www.soundwave.net.nyud.net:8090/~wmono/stor age.html
The best way to save your pictures is to keep several digital copies of them and periodically check for errors. If one copy is corrupted, restore it using the other copies. When analog media deteriorates, restoring it is not nearly so easy.
This story and the writeup are so clueless they're not even funny. From the article:
Unlike, say, faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital file becomes corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.
Gee, if only we had some sort of mechanisms for detecting and correcting errors in digital data.
(pause)
OK, now that all the programmers in the audience have had a good laugh, let me make it clear: Just about every storage medium and every communications protocol in existence is loaded with error correction mechanisms. This is why you can scratch up a CD-ROM (to some extent) and still read it just fine. And if that's not good enough for you, you can always make backups. Every backup you make drastically reduces the chance of data loss. And if you check your backups regularly, replacing the corrupt ones, the chance of data loss becomes zero for all practical purposes.
The only real problem discussed in the story is the one of mediums becoming obsolete. If you loaded all your important data on 3.5" floppies ten years ago you might have some trouble accessing them today. For normal people like us, this isn't too big a problem: Just copy your data over to new media every few years. For the library of congress, though, such a technique isn't quite so feasible.
My first CD'rs ( which are stored away safely ) are now aleady starting to have issues.. they are about 9 years old.. )
I assume newer generation disks are better..
But, i have 20 year old 5 1/4 floppies and DCxxx tapes that are still good to go...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This page has a number of public domain schemes that might work. Some are fault more fault tolerant than others, but many of them should work.
Serious use of these schemes would require some kind of "Rosetta Stone" document or sculpture to make breaking the codes easy. If the archivist was to act carefully, I bet it would be possible for great-hoevermanygenerations-grandkid to break the bar code scheme, just by knowing a that the pattern is a rational symbology and by having enough repetition, of course. Automating the process would of course take some Perl scripting genius, or whatever they will be using.
Quality paper can last a really really long time.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Will this data be useful?
Are our lives better spent worrying about archiving our data when we are about to die or is there a natural selection in society that chooses what information gets to be propogated?
Seems like a real battle to preserve everything when we live on a organic ever changing planet.
Maybe we should keep what we can and hope our grandkids will be find the interesting stuff and preserve is also.
Archiving our data seems more of a life lesson about letting go. We last a short while as do our footprints on this earth.
btw: I do try to preserve all my data.
Like any format, digital mediums will decay, and can be lost / broken / burnt.
:
So I follow a backup routine for data that is important to me (my photos)
1. "Live" copy on PC.
2. Continual backup to iRiver (portable).
3. Backup to Xbox hard drive every month or so.
4. Occasinal archive to DVD.
I'm covered for accidental deletion by 3/4, and 1/2 give me redundancy for hard drive failures and a level of risk I'm willing to accept if there is a fire (my iRiver lives in my trousers, and I'd take them out if the house was burning down).
Might add that I keep a copy on my girlfriends PC which is a long way away, which gives the final piece of mind.
I'd also consider archiving really important data to gmail or something..
Long story short, remember to use a laser printer and store it away from plastic containers!
> Digital lends itself to duplication,
Digital images are higher maintenance than my
high school, cheerleader ex-girlfriend.
Imagine how many cave paintings we'd have left
if they had to be converted from one format to
another every two or so decades for *hundreds* of
years. Hint: none.
A good silver-based print made today and stored
in a typical residential closet will be viewable in
200-300 years without any special tools and without
any format translations. That impresses the heck
out of me.
How many format or media changes will a digital
image shot with a digital cameara have to go through
in 200 years?
The Dead Sea Scrolls are 2,000 years old. They
are still in their original format. I can't access
homework I created on my TRS-80 Model 4 just 20 years
ago even though I have the single-sided 5 1/4-inch
disks in my closet.
I'm sold on digital photography but not because I
think the images will be around in 100 years. Who is
going to want to look at my pictures in 100 years?
Heck, not that many people want to look at them now.
Photography is about communication not permanence.
I shoot digital because it is cheaper and my out-of-town
relatives can view pictures of our newborn son online
the day or even hour they were shot.
My son was born at 10:46 pm and photos were online
by 11:31 pm. You simply can't do that with prints. I'll
take instant communications now over archived photos
in 50 years.
> Photos, slides and negatives don't last forever,
I have family photos -- daguerreotypes -- from the
late 1800s. The pictures look as good today as they
did 100 years ago. The picture quality isn't as good as
your typical two-megapixel point-n-shoot but the photo
is viewable using the same technology now as was
available then -- human eyes.
No special equipment is needed and that is key.
Certainly my Nikon D70 produces better images but
those images aren't going to be around as long as that
1872 daguerreotype.
I know my digital photos won't last as long as my
father's TRI-X negatives or my grandfather's silver-based
black and white prints.
My great-grandkids will be able to view that 1872
daguerreotype but my digital pictures will be lost unless
someone has translated them through a dozen different
intermediary formats, reprinting them on the latest and
greatest paper. I can't see anyone going to that kind of
trouble to keep my images alive. A few, maybe, but not
as many as if they just had to toss a shoebox in the
back of a closet.
My day job is as a Senior Systems Analyst for a
large daily newspaper. I support the newsroom and spent
the last six months installing a state of the art digital
photo archive system. There are nearly half a million
photos in the archive and over seven million photo
outtakes. I'm really good at what I do (if I do say so
myself) and there are many levels of redundancy and
backups in the photo system.
Still, if I wanted to make sure I could view a photo
in 50 years, I'd put a few prints on silver-based paper
and stick 'em in a safe deposit box.
Matt
Our Linux file server uses LVM on top of RAID-5 (4 120GB SATA and PATA drives, resulting in 240GB of space with 1 drive in hot standby). We do a full backup to (SCSI based) DDS-3 tape (using LVM snapshots) every Sunday. We then do incrementals each day to DDS-3 tape. Data is stored using standard tar format (so there is NO chance of NOT being able to access the data in 5, 10 or even 50 years). We also do not use DDS-3 compression, so there is no tying the data on the tape to a specific drive format (we currently have both Sony and Seagate drives). Our critical data requires 6 12GB DDS-3 tapes (72GB) - we are currently looking at upgrading to DDS-4 (24GB per tape so only 3 tapes needed).
Each weeks worth of tapes are then stored in a safe. The first backup of each month is then transfered to our safety deposit box at a local bank. After six months or so we purge every second monthly backup set (just re-use the tapes). After a year we perform the same operation to yield 3 monthly backup sets per year archived forever. We have been doing this since 1997 (back with only DDS-2), so you can imagine that we have quite a few tapes.
Although tape is not by any means a perfect medium (it is susceptible to strong magnetic fields and tape tension can be a problem) it has proven itself to the IT world for decades to be very reliable. We plan on staying with DDS based technology, which is backwards compatible (at least for reading). If for some reason DDS is no longer a viable technology we will have to re-visit our archived data (at least one snapshot per year) and transfer it to a new medium.
Why do we keep data for so long? Well, I have personally lost files that were supposed to be on a hard-drive which ended up being corrupted. Our so-called backup was using an unreliable medium, which had degraded. There was only one backup made so we lost the data. This system was designed to avoid such a problem, yet nothing is perfect.
Where loved ones are remembered: Memoriam.org
Tkhs si priuf toat yio ondy nled a fqw lejjkrs to bo tyged rimgt.
You're drunk aren't you?
No fair! Reziac admitted he was using *my* brain so that "Insightful" mod point should rightfully be *mine* ;)
VCWhile this is true in principle, when taking a longer range view it doesn't hold up. We take for granted what is meant by "content" and the lines between data and metadata become fuzzy. I've opened up an old word processing document in a plain text editor to glean as much textual content as I can find, but been at a loss to recover the formatting.
As trivial as the formatting may seem, compare the look and feel of a 19th century document to a modern one. A strong ethos and aesthetic permeates the formatting choices in a document. Archivists know how to preserve a physical object, but digital sources are tightly coupled to their display mechanism. While you can make a perfect bit for bit copy with no loss, the display medium has a limited shelf life. Emulators only prolong the inevitable -- an orphaned file with interface.
I'm reminded of a situation with a laser disc created in the 70s and sent along on one of the voyager space craft. The text included the text from a book that is nearly a thousand years old. Last year they had to resurrect a PDP-based machine in a museum to read the disc and migrate it to some other format. If they keep doing this every 25 years, what will the data look like? Imagine non-binary computational devices and non-ascii character representations of text or non-gif images. Since they still have the physical book they may fair alright, but left to its own, there are lots of ways that digital data migration can and will fail.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I did this tool as a school project once that would print the data on a sheet of paper, and then reconstruct the file from a scan. It stored maybe 100KB per page. Of course, with a 600 dpi printer you can concievably store some 10MB of data per page with enough error correction to make it worthwhile. All you need is a laser printer, and a cheap scanner with higher resolution than the printer. And some acid-free paper. And some 80 pages of paper to store a CDs worth of data.
Any one have some recommendations for a picture file format as slick as the mp3 file format is for music?
My problem with digital photographs is keeping track of the who, what, where, when, and why that is going on in each picture. I can name files with the date they were taken, and the place or maybe who is in them if just 1 or 2 people. But what I really want is to be able to save a few paragraphs of information (potentially) direcly into the picture file. That way I don't have to keep track of such info in disconnected file (database) that might be seperated from the picture at any point. I want to be able to put information in my picture files the same way I can tag mp3 files, plus a larger free form text area so I can tell the story of the best pictures right in the file.
An iTunes like product to go with these nifty picture files would be beautiful! Thanks.
~ Mr Blank
Your Ad Here.
RTFA. TFA is talking about the longevity of *formats*, not just media. Who can say that there will be MP3 decoder implementations in the year 2050 for your pristeen collection of digital songs?
Face it -- analog formats *and* media survive the ages longer. You have the capability to play an LP your parents purchased in the 50's. Likewise you can see pictures taken then and earlier, be they prints, negatives, slides, what have you.
But on the downside, they are inherently lossy and less-convienent (today) than digital media.
I can commiserate. What I have discovered to my great dismay is that backing up is relatively cheap. Tapes are a pretty reasonable bang for the buck. If you only care about a time horizon of 2-3 years. Archiving however, for beyond that horizon, starts to get distressingly expensive.
We have unsupported versions of various software we consult upon, whose age stretches back 10 years or more. A non-trivial amount of our business revolves around upgrading clients who decide to finally get a supported version (usually coinciding with upgrading their entire server), and we have to keep these old versions around so we can work on issues in our labs. Sometimes our clients have lost the media, and the production installation is their only copy of the software.
We have been keeping the data on CDs and RAID 5 arrays, keeping it all online, and backing up to Ecrix tapes (soon to be Ultrium 2) but now that we are expanding our service coverage the amount we have to archive is exploding. So keeping everything online is not going to scale for us, and we have to start thinking about real archiving.
A summary of the options we have considered and issues we discovered.
These are just the major media options we considered. We looked into variations within these major options as well. If there are other major options we should consider, please let us all know.
We're considering the following solution. Suggestions are greatly welcomed. Incremental backups to Ultrium 2 tapes, that are duplicated and stored in two geographically separate locations. This is all the usual data: email, work files, databases, etc.; anything that sits in the data filesystems of our RAID 5 arrays. Backup tapes are just held for seven years (tax purposes), only used for restores, wiped, and then tossed. Out of the backups, we identify the archival class data.
Immediately migrate our archival-class data to an Ultrium 2 tape library. Archival-class data is stuff like ISO images of the software we consult upon, accounting database after books are closed, tax filings, and anything that makes it into a project portal. Deliver near-line access of the archival data to the Ultrium 2 tape library through an HSM solution. Rotate these tapes for fresh tapes every 24 months. At the same time, a parchive'd duplicate of the archival files are written to an Ecrix
It seems every half a year or so we have an article about the same boring shit - how digital data can be tragically lost. Cry me a river. I don't know about everyone else, but I've got all my personal files starting from 1996 just intact. If you care about your files, storing them forever is easy. Just get an external hard-drive and do regular incremental backups. Store all important files on CD/DVD four times a year. Do an off-site copy every 2 years (encrypt and pack all files using zip, copy to external HDD, go to a friend and copy to his computer). The cost of doing this is trivial (200$ for HDD amortized over 5 years) and the time is rather small (15 min/week for weekly backup, 2 hours for disk backup, 6 hours for offsite backup, for a total of 24 hours per year per household). This will virtually guarantee that all your files are intact for as long as you want. You can of course, spend less time with a little bit less safety.
Regarding the access, it's extremely simple. Don't use e-mail clients that store messages in proprietary formats (like Outlook), don't rip music to DRMed formats, save personal videos as DivX AVI and that's all.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This site apparently can convert just about any format, including punch cards, paper tape, 9-track, even the super bizarre Apple Lisa Twiggy disks!
VintageTech
http://www.vintagetech.com
Beam all your data into space and have Kang and/or Kodos retreive it when you need it. Or move to Rigel 7 and download it when it gets there.
Then with the right sendmail filter, you can mail a query that will return you the data of interest.
In a billion years everything you observe around you is going to be blown away when our Sun becomes a red giant and engulfs our planet, making Mars the new Mercury. If I were you I would take all my CDs and DVDs of family photos and have them launched into orbit around Neptune. There they will chill for a huge period of time until the Arturians finally reach the source of all that bad programming that was radiated into space, our Solaris system, just in time to watch the fireworks. There they will find the pathetic works of a now extinct civilization that looked up the stars but kept getting distracted by his boot on his fellow human's head. The few remaining trinkets and images they discover will be taken back to a museum on their world along with various Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, only to be lost in a freak warehouse fire a month later due to faulty wiring. A hearty laugh they will give as they note to each other, "see, their little image makers stole their souls after all."
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Actually the iPod is a lot tougher than you seemed to think. Mine has survived some very hard impacts, imagine someone tossing the iPod at the ground as hard as they can.
However my real point is it's a SECOND device. The photos are still on the computer of course (or else how would they get to the iPod in the first place?) but the iPod Photo makes it dead simple for someone to have a secondary backup, that might not otherwise know to even bother with burning something to CD-ROM or buy an external drive. Since it has a purpose other than backups, it also provides some justificaton for purchase rather than an exteranl HD which some members of the household might see as an unessecary expense (though if they thought that way the expense of an iPod Photo would probably be rather offputting anyway).
Still, it might be a way for example to get grandparents or other simlarily challenged computer people to backup pictures without even knowing they are doing so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I know your post was merely made in jest, but it is currently entirely possible to do what you suggest with networks like Freenet.
Your encrypted data is basically spread around all other user's shares. You could just GPG encrypt your files (slightly redundant, since freenet strongly encrypts the files anyway) into a big tarball, and share them on freenet. Eventually they'd be effectively mirrored by other users. You'd just have to remember the right key to retrieve that specific file.
Also, All this nonsense about digital photos being so hard to keep for a long time is utter rubbish. Hard drive capacities have been increasing with Moore's law for a long time. Those X MB of pictures you have on a CD/on your hard drive/on the web right now are trivial compared to what storage capacities will be in ten years when it really is time to move away from those legacy CD-R's/IDE hard drives/webhosts. Moore's law makes this "problem" a non-issue.
You can't say the same about those precious prints you had ordered. If someone smudges them, they're *poof* if you don't have a digital copy.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
My wife and I are picture crazy... she more than I but since I'm the geek I get the resposibility of maintaining the archive. Currently, we keep 2 DVD sets (4+ DVDs in a set) in the safe as well as a single DVD set out for general use. A running copy is on the harddrives of 2 seperate computers in the house. Once every 6 months to a year we reburn the general DVD set and one of the sets in the safe and throw the 'old' ones on a junk spindle. She also has a couple dozen photo albums she puts her favorites in but those are for showing off, not for archival.
So far the only disk we have had go bad was one of disks in the safe. Nothing happened to the disk it just wouldn't read. My guess is that something went screwy with the burn even though we burn with verify on.
Each DVD costs about 40 cents so it's about 6 bucks to create the 3 sets. For a grand total of $12 per year we have ~15 gig of photos, along the lines of 9000 photos per set, backed up beyond any reasonably foreseeable disaster (we do intend to move one of the 'safe' sets to a deposit box when we get one). To print each of these images on el'cheapo Wal-Mart Kodak processing would cost 24 cents * 9000 images = $2160.00. A fairly cheap $20 album holds 100 pictures so you're talking another $1800 for albums brining it to about $4000 just to print and store all our photos in the absolute *cheapest* manner possible not to mention the massive storage space. Even if the cheapest printing and the cheapest albums we're archival quality, which they most definitely are not, there's no way you could convince me that my disks in a safe are going to crap out before something happens to the 60 cubic feet of photo albums in the basement.
So, unless you're storing one image that can never be touched, never be copied, never exposed to light or brought out in the open then yes, print and archival and store it in a glass case. For anyone else, buy a $40 DVD spindle and shut the hell up.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Paper... archival, acid-free paper. Carbon-pigmented ink or toner... This can work!
Bear with me. Paper really is a durable medium. How much data can realistically be printed onto a sheet of paper? 2-D barcodes, error-correction, redundancy... The only part you'd have to keep current would be the software to scan the pages and reconstruct the files.
Ooo, I can see a new use for "KBarcode" in this. "Translate file into barcoded pages..." Sure software compatibility might still be a problem, like trying to read old MS-Works files, but data in simpler forms would be fine.
I still have >90% of my porn from the very early 90s (91/92)... it arrived via 2400bps modem and survived because IDE has largely been compatible over the years... 40MB HD -> 240MB -> 330MB -> 4GB -> Who knows because I've lost count of the new ones. I just keep copying it to the new disks.
I do see a potential problem if you're the type of person who likes to burn a CD, then keep using that CD, or puts that CD away and deletes duplicate copies.
In that case you best bet is to buy archival quality CDs (do they still sell those?) make 4-5 copies, and then make it a point of refreshing to whatever the latest media is every few years...
I came across 4 CDs from the mid 90s that held a bunch of digital pictures (back when you developed film and could get a CD/floppy of the prints)... I re-burned all 4 to a single DVD disk (actually two disks in case one is damaged/fails)... but I also dumped those pictures onto my HD, since space is waaaaaaaay more cheaper then it was back in the 90s.
Maybe it's not as easy as putting pictures in a shoebox and leaving them in a closet for 60 years, but I think it's simple enough. We also have the ability to distribute huge numbers of copies of these pictures/videos to other people for what is essencially no money... so even if you blow it and die with your encryption passwords, someone else will probably have copies of the files.
Why dont people just email the photos in small chunks to their GMAIL account, then its stored FOREVER!!!!
I know, dont rely on it, but its another backup, among the 30 copies you sent to ALL your relatives, and 2nd copy sitting inside your XBOX and the 3rd in your removable HD.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
IMHO it is a somewhat bogus article, because it incorrectly assumes that the previous problem, the one of reataining documents from the past into the present, is the same as the next problem, the one of preserving documents from the present into the future. Those are in fact quite different problems and solutions to one do not apply to the other.
In particular:
1- The problem with carrying along your data when you upgrade to a new computer no longer really exists. If you stored copies of your writings on a TRS-80 I tape cartridge how did you tranfer that to 5 1/4 floppy when you upgraded to a C-64 with a 5150 floppy drive? You could not. What do you do with Mac HFS Syquest cartridges when you upgraded to an 386 Linux box with Zip drives? Storage formats were ideosyncratic but are not now. There are now popular mediums of data exchange between all platforms, not to mention that everthing is networked. Futhermore, the rate of growth in hard drive storage capacity now more than doubles every format generation, so there is usually plenty of room on your new hard drive for all your old files from that old drive. So- Data transfer to new computers: problem in the past, not a problem for the future.
2. Some photographic hardcopy has lasted, so the article suggests using that. However, as others here have already pointed out, longevity depends on the photographic process, and hardcopy from inkjet printers is not the same thing as photographic prints. So: hardcopy image storage: retained images for decades in the past, may not in the future .
3. Preserving image data in an analog format worked in the past because cameras were invented relativly recently and came into widespread use within living memory. But the future of photography will be longer than the history of photography. A preservation method good for 100 years might be useless for 1000 years. In particular, copy fidelity for analog data makes it almoust useless for millenial storage. Digital storage has perfect copy fidelity. So- Analog image storage: worked for all of photographic history in the past, will not work for all of photographic history into the future.
4. In the past, for each "original" that you wanted to exist into the future, you had to perserve one original from the past. With analog Mona Lisa, we have one copy now because we saved one from the past. But with digital copies, for any number of "originals" that you want in the future, you only need to preserve a constant number of copies, one, from the past. With digital Mona Lisa, we could have a million copies in the futrure becasue we preserve one from the present. So- original work: required multiple analog originals in the past, requires a single digital original in the future.
5. The cost of redundancy was high in the past and is low now. I can churn out multiple digital copies at home now real cheap and they take up little space. Analog photo copies were hard to make and took up lots of space.
The upshot is, despite what worked best in the past, the rules have changed. The only way to preserve your photos with perfect fidelity for unlimited time into the future is to get your photos into digital format ASAP on redundant media which you regenerate periodically by transfering to fresh media.
(shameless commercial plug) I have friend in the business of digitizing and restoring analog prints. He will start with your decaying analog photos and give you both digital copies and prints with Epson archival-quality paper and inks which, according to Epson, are good for decades. So if you are uncertain about the the digital format/ analog print issue, you can do both.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
You're just not trying hard enough. I did mine ... see www.nick-andrew.net and there's all of it - it's online, available to the world, been copied to www.trs-80.com, backed up on two continents as well as CDR.
Although I had quite a hard time retrieving the data from the 5.25 inch disks, the work's done now and the original 5.25" disks have been destroyed and I now have multiple copies of it all on fresh media.
What's not long been clear is that long-term digital archival is a serious problem for the average Joe Blow consumer. Only in recent history have non-techie people begun to rely on digital backups for precious data such as family photos and video, tax returns, etc.
What we need is affordable long-term archival backup services for average consumers. The pickings are incredibly slim, despite the large number of companies offering "online backup". There are two problems here.
First, most people offering online backup services do not seriously stand behind their reliability, even in the short term. The fine print usually reveals that they absolve themselves from nearly all liability for completely losing your data.
Second, there's little reason to believe most of these online backup companies will even be around in 50 years when your grandkids want to retrieve your decades-old backed up digital photos (preferably in whatever bitmap format is in vogue in 2054). Certainly, most of the online backup companies clamoring for attention at the height of the dot-com boom are long gone, along with all the data they purported to keep safe for customers.
What's needed is a large, stable company with some long-term credibility (such as IBM) to offer long-term archival services that are affordable to ordinary consumers, and that are believably robust and long-lasting. If a company is willing to post a bond that promises me $100,000 if they are ever unable to retrieve my data, then I begin to at least believe that they are seriously safeguarding it. Whether they will stay in business for the next 50 years is much more difficult to demonstrate with confidence.
I recall a discussion on /. regarding the keeping time of CD's and people in hot climates finding fungus growing in poorly-sealed CD-R's, etc, a while back [way too lazy to look for a link].
The simplest suggestion I found in the whole discussion was to archive your files and rename the archive as "Paris_Hilton_lesbian_jelly_wrestling.avi" or whatever, depending on which tart is on the front of FHM that month.
Any time a backup fails, just fire up Kazaa and download your archive again..
0 points for originality, but I'm pleasantly surprised at my powers of recall..
PAR2 error correction, RAID collocated, and Subversion. Simple.
P2P filesharing is also becoming a great way to backup popular files. Using networks such as Gnutella, you can even retrieve the file using a SHA1 hash. Magnet URIs, anyone?
http://pixelcort.com/
elaberate.
Harddrive
meadia
failes
medea
Expotentional
scrateches
repeted
ware
origional.
Physial
wares
Good Luck!
Phisical
demish
oposit
indrustry
fiew
Good Luck!
Does anyone have information on CD/DVD stamping as a possible archive method, as opposed to dye based CDRs? Are there any articles/research projects that talk about the permanence difference between the two? Does anyone know of a service that will stamp a small run of disks for a reasonable price?
I am a self-confessed hoarder and I, too, copy everything over from old system to new system like this. On a new system, you generally don't even notice the space taken up, even if you do a complete dump of everything on the old hard disk (deleting system-specific things like the DOS/Windows directory and so forth). Then, store the original hard disk media away for safe keeping, so you have multiple backups of your oldest data. You'd have to be pretty unlucky for all the media to fail at once.
It can be fun looking back over those 286 games you used to play (Captain Comic, anyone?). On the downside, you end up with a lot of crap that won't run on the newer systems. If you're really keen, this can be solved with emulation.
Here is a site that talks about how long printed images will last, Wilhelm Research seems to be an authority on the subject:
http://www.wilhelm-research.com/
They talk about cheap inks to avoid and various paper/ink combinations among many other factors.
this guy is the worst...look at his comment history..it's a massacre of the english language.
You're talking about prints. The most important question is how long the negatives will keep.
Here's a mantra most people don't understand: The negatives are more valuable than the prints. If you value your pictures, you should take good care of them. Which means storing them in archival sleeves, somewhere cool, dark and dry.
So, the photos are now useless, unless I scan them in and do some pretty heavy enhancement
Not necessarily. The real questions are (a) do you have the negatives, and if you do, (b) what condition are they in.
By "them" I'm referring to the negatives. I shoot thousands of frames a year (mostly slides, though), and if I had to get prints for all the rolls, I'd throw most away (I usually just get large, 8x12" index prints for reference). I store the negs and slides religiously, though.
I typed this just as I went to class, I saw the /. article just before I closed my pc (notebook) and wanted to read it, but I did not have the time. As it was, I was 2 minutes late for class.
--
Some of us have lives off the internet. The rest of us just pretend
Video Production Support
Yes, but magnetic medium physically falls apart after large ammounts of use or being stored in an improper environment. It is usually very hard to keep magnetic media properly. Even CD and DVD based writable media does not keep as well as replicated media due to the chemicals in it. Also, most sticker-type labels contain chemicals that will weaken the CD/DVD based media even more.
BTW, I have about 3 copies of that on 4 disks each, and only one of them works properly.
--
Amiga Forever! Apple II for almost as long!
Video Production Support
People hoard too muchb stuff anyway. I have had several data bereavements and like most things time heals. I cannot even remember what I lost tbh. For stuff which does need to be kept, someone should invent a black-box recorder for PC data. I know there are several online archiving services, but what happens if they go bust ?
There are relatively few people in the world who will be upset if the digital photos of your family vacations are irretrieveably lost.
But consider the loss to the world when great works of literature, music, and the arts disappear. The growing trend is for distribution of all art forms on digital media, and encrypted digital media at that. And thanks to to the DMCA and extended copyrights, it's against the law to make backup copies.
Who believes the content distributors will spend the money to maintain proper archival copies of these art forms as the artist wanes in popularity (or is never properly recognized in the first place) and sales drop to zero? Ten, twenty, or thirty years later when the original digital media has long deteriorated, the only copies of these works to survive will have been those made by "pirates". Speak of a coming Dark Age for our cultural legacy!!!
(Were it not for books moldering in libraries for many decades, the works of then-underappreciated authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald would be unknown to us today - imagine what would happen had he been published only as encrypted e-books.)
Ok, you may have to wait a while to get to a particular section of the serial stream, but you could repeat important things at know intervals and be guaranteed to find it within a certain amount of time.
Not enough space to hold your data? Point your laser at Pluto. Need more space? How about one of those recently found planets around a distant star?
Produce redundant streams if the data is important. If you miss one stream, catch another.
Profit
There is a ULTIMATE backup way... rename your pictures with every pr0n term you know and makes them available on the Internet on EDonkey, Kazaa... File swappers will keep them alive as long as Internet will be alive ;)
This is the second article I've seen on this topic. All that's really needed is to convert the files to newer formats as these come along. Wow. Why does this seem to escape the majority of storage "pundits"?
So to match the capacity of a $10 DVD+R(DL) disk, we would need 34 reams of paper. Nasty.