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...)"

Comments

Re:Tell me about it

[kentmartin]

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.

Re:Umm

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

Re:Watch out for mistakes

[Megaslow]

Do you run rsync with --delete? If not, how do you deal with moved files? If so, how do you deal with accidental deletion?

Simple, keep multiple online copies using something like rsnapshot.

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.