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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
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.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
--Linus Torvalds
E pluribus unum
But you have time to read a story on
Alien v Predator script saved by Internet pirates
Amazing anaecdote from Peter Briggs, the author of the screenplay for Alien Versus Predator.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
This is especially true if you print them out at home. Which makes me even madder that I fell for that "here's a cheap printer with a gazillion DPI" scam that Epson was running a few years back. Once I added the cost of photo paper and cartridges, it was more expensive than developing the pics.
Hundreds of years? Have you seen the fade on photos 50 years ago, 100 years ago? These are even supposed to be the cherrished chemical grail that will make photos last forever. Would you like to know what photographers do with photos/film that they want to last for years, put them in a pitch black room insde of binders in drawers, that are rarely opened. The room is controlled both for humidity and temp. I'll take buying a new HDD every 6 months to that. Then you can print new prints every 10 years and abuse them to hearts wishes, not have to place the photo over there since it is too close to the sunlight, or go rabid if a kid tears up a $.20 peice of paper.
I don't think the basement really qualifies as being a separate house. I mean, what if the whole place goes up in flames?
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 $20 you can have a USB floppy drive to let you move them to a CD.
Old media meant that the cost of the dupe was pretty much the same cost of the original. This doesn't lend itself to redundant copies at multiple locations for most people. Digital lends itself to duplication, just ask any movie pirate.
There are films from the 20's that are lost forever. Thanks to DVD pirates, we have enough redundant copies of Star Wars that it will never be gone.
Posting links that require login isn't particularly new. Do you complain about them EVERY time they're posted?
Complaining about posted links that require login isn't particularly new. Do you complain about comments like this EVERY time they're posted?
I store my data on redundant arrays of disks in two geographical locations (my house and my parents' house, synced nightly via rsync).
Do you run rsync with --delete? If not, how do you deal with moved files? If so, how do you deal with accidental deletion?
I grant that you've solved the decaying media problem, but I've lost more data to screwups than to bitrot.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
:-)
A minor fade can still be pretty bad. I found an envelope of 1980s-era colour prints as taken by my father - all seemingly of a number of people with cameras standing outside, near some flowerbeds and low fences.
On closer inspection, I noticed the very faint, faded image of the Taj Mahal in the background, near-indistinguishable from the sky.
So, the photos are now useless, unless I scan them in and do some pretty heavy enhancement - but then what am I supposed to do with the results?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
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.
Hundreds of years? Have you seen the fade on photos 50 years ago, 100 years ago?
Standard colour prints are made with organic dyes. Those fade in time.
Black and white photos are silver
Those don't fade but other factors like the underlying paper turning yellow or the underlying film being cellulose nitrate a close relative of nitro cellulose (AKA gun cotton) causes it to disintegrate.
For the chemical holy grail, (and this goes back to my knowledge gained in the 80s and early 90s)you're looking at Kodachrome 64 slide film and cibachrome positive-positive paper.
Both use inorganic dyes and both have withstood a battery of tests and time.
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.
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."