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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...)"
User "gaygaygay"
Pass "gaygaygay"
Hope that helps.
I just had a bit of a google. According to this DVDs have a lifetime of 30-50 years.
A better read though, is this which is an article about who to best go about long term storage on CDRs.
It includes the tip, amongst a load of others, that the top of CDR's is far more fragile and needs to be treated with great care.
Properly cared for, black and white negatives will keep for a very long time. Nobody knows exactly how long "a long time" is, but negatives from the turn of the last century are still perfectly viable.
Colour materials are another matter. Because they are based on chemical dyes instead of silver crystals, they are subject to chemical change (i.e. fading). Current films quote longevity of 50 to 100 years.
...laura
While it is ture that they wear out too, But if you keep them in good contition they can easilly last for hundreds of years.
:-)
Nobody's too sure how long inkjet printouts will last. My own printer's inks and paper are supposedly safe for a century (according to accelerated ageing tests using ultra-violet lamps, or something similar), but I'll still be keeping all the original JPEGs, regularly backed up on to some lowest-common-denominator medium (currently CDRs).
Professional digital photo prints are likely be be pretty long-lasting if they're the optical ones done on to real light-sensitive photographic paper - they'll probably be identical to conventional colour photos. Keep them out the light, in a cool, dry place, and they probably won't fade significantly for decades.
Still, keep those JPEGs...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Just my 2 cents, but the black and white, old time silver photograph my grandma showed me of the first family member in America from like 1870 or something looked better than any digital print out I've seen lately. Granted, the image was never super clear to begin with, but it almost hasn't aged. Its slow and expensive, but chemical processes have a permenence digital stuff lacks.
Once I added the cost of photo paper and cartridges, it was more expensive than developing the pics.
Printing on the printer costs me more, yes, almost twice as much as printing at the store. However, if you consider 250 pictures taken on vacation, I might want to print 10 of them as 8"x10", total cost about $20. Developing 250 pictures would cost at least $80, and I'd only get 4"x6"s, plus an additional $10 to get the 10 I want blown up to 8"x10" *after* I get the original prints back. The cost comes from not having to develop and print every single picture.
Not to mention the convenience of not having to drive to the photo lab, to wait for the lone employee to serve the three people in front of you, the frustration of being told yesterday was a holiday and the pictures would not be ready until the next day...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I keep several months worth of point-in-time "copies" of my home dirs, mail, /etc, and other stuff online and available on separate hardware.
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.
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
The problem that I've seen with these online photo albums is that they don't let you download the original uploaded file...you can only view an oversized thumbnail. Doing a right-click -> Save As won't get you the original quality of the image.
Mystic (dunno about the others) does save them for a time being, but you have to pay like $.50 to download the hi-res image. If you wanted to do this to hundreds of images, that's hardly cost-effective.
If there are indeed sites that allow it, I'd be all for using them, but due to costs, I doubt they'd be offered for free. In fact, my mom has been doing that with Ofoto, and she got a message that since she hasn't bought anything in a long time, they may delete her albums. One would be better off paying for cheap web hosting with a lot of storage space.
Here is a place to start with...
-Phlack
rdiff-backup uses rsync to create incremental backups, and you can --remove-older-than or recover from whatever point the backup was made. a mini archive of old (deleted) files, etc. files are not fully removed from the backup until they have been erased for X days. keep the backup on an encrypted external drive.
make a nation wide psudo raid array in five locations. if one dies, replace it, and it will get the data at the next sync.
do it wirelessly to your neighbor's houses with your equipment. give them the $1/mo electricity increase.
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
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.
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
This guy's advice is not smart.
Amen to that. You know this same damned topic comes up on slashdot about every 9 months. And every time, I interject the same thing:
The best method of archival storage of color images is an archival quality CD-R!
The CD-R takes up so much less space than a rack of kodachrome slides (the only color archival quality film) and is orders of magnitude less expensive and an order of magnitude higher quality than a box of pigmented ink printed pictures, that it wins hands down. Newspapers just love publishing this crap about the 5 year shelf life of an economy CD-R. For about $1/CD you can buy a spindle of Mitsui MAM-A Gold Standard CD-R's. In archival storage, these things have an expected shelf life of 200 (TWO HUNDRED) years which exceeds the expected shelf life of both the kodachrome and the prints.
Then people bring up "but what will you read them with in 200 years?" Well, seeing as how somebody on a whim figured out a way to reproduce audio from a scan of a record, I strongly suspect someone could restore data on a 200 year old archival quality CD based an on optical scan as well.
I love photography, and I am slightly bitter about the decline of film, but the facts are hard to deny. Digital is just a better medium to preserve your most cherished memories).
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)