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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...)"
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
--Linus Torvalds
E pluribus unum
Alien v Predator script saved by Internet pirates
Amazing anaecdote from Peter Briggs, the author of the screenplay for Alien Versus Predator.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I've archived some of important documents onto clay tablets using Sanskrit, but I'm starting to run out of storage space. Even worse, the neighbours are starting to complain about the smoke from my kiln drifting across into their garden.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Even worse, the neighbours are starting to complain about the smoke from my kiln drifting across into their garden.
Just tell them not to worry, it's awl write.
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And when you replace those DVDs in 20 years with something even better, the photos will still be in 100% perfect condition. Try that with an actual print of the picture.
This guy's advice is not smart. Bascially he's saying "take your perfect copy that might die at some point and replace it with an imperfect copy that is guaranteed to deteriorate with age." Heck, I'll just laser print all my documents for backup as well. We all know there's no way they could possibly be lost then. We all know going analog is much safer than backing up and refreshing the data on new media periodically because all those prints of movies, music and documents from 75 years ago look and sound so damn good.
I'll take my chances with backing up and copying data periodically over my skills as a museum currator any day.
TW