"Where will your digital photos be in 20 years? Or 10? Or even five? It’s a question those of us who are firing away with our digital cameras really have to think about. And act on. When it comes to long-term preservation, one thing is obvious—those images won’t be on your computer’s hard drive. Even if an all-out crash doesn’t wipe them away (as happened on my image-filled laptop last year), chances are you won’t still have that computer, any more than you’re now typing on an Osborne, Kaypro, or Atari. The diligent among us back up with CDs or DVDs. We burn them ourselves or have a photofinisher do it when we drop off our memory cards. It’s smart and easy. A typical CD can store 600 5-megapixel images; a single DVD, seven times that number. But it’s only a matter of years until these media become what the music world’s 8-tracks are to today’s MP3s. In the future, we might have to prowl yard sales or eBay, or some other land of bygone technology, to find a machine that can handle antiquated CDs or DVDs."
What would happen to you if turned on your computer tonight and your hard drive was fried? I back up my photos on DVDs, but I am always worried about how long that format will last. If I stick them in the attic and forget about them for 20 years, will they be dust in a plastic case? Of course Fuji Film says print them out, but inkjet printers don't archive well so are we to send our photos to the photo lab?
So what do we do about this problem? Does anyone have a solution?
Welcome to the flip side of digital. I keep my photo's and things backed up in two different places (350 miles apart) but I also worry about if those files can be read in 20 years or so. This also happens with my studio recordings, sure I can edit and mix and do what I like but unlike tape that can last decades with little degrading digital is not that forgiving. A loss in high end or something like that can be corrected with tape but a corrupt file means you've lost your whole track. My mom and dad have photo's taken over 30 years ago that look good and I'm really concerned if I can say that 30 years from now. Backups are good but if you have nothing to read that backup file or the files that have been restored than what good is it?
I think this is a Chicken Little ("They sky is falling, the sky is falling!") scenario. It's much ado about nothing.
Two things tell me this:
1) If you back up your photos, you won't lose them. You can't back up physical photos nearly as easily.
2) While it might be true that an optical drive 30 years from now might not be able to read a CD or DVD from today, the reality is that the next few generations will. So if, five years from now, we're all using Blue-Ray DVD burners, we should re-archive our content from CD to the newer format, and keep doing that over the years, so we're always up to date.
When I upload photos from my camera to my desktop, I will go through and delete the imperfect shots. The remainders are then organized for printing. I print 5x7 prints of these shots, plastic cover the sheets, and then place in a book tabbed with the directory the files are stored under.
I used to be more laid back about backing up the files till my hard drive freaked on me in September. Luckily I was able to rerecognize it and transfer all of the important files to a new hard drive. Now I backup monthly to clean dvd-r's.
I figure that at worst case, I could always scan the backup print if I totally lost the original files.
In addition to several backups (4 that i can think of) on my local network, I also backup over a VPN on the Internet to a remote PC every night, and burn DVDs occasionally.
I'm not too worried about not being able to open the files years from now. It isn't like JPEG, BMP, or TIFF will go away before some other suitable replacement is found, and the images can be converted at that time.
We are in a new situation that is different from what we have encountered in the past. You can make perfect copies of digital images. But you can't do the same thing with film and analog technologies. Moving a digital image from one form of storage to another does not result in any degradation so long as the image is not re-compressed.
So if, five years from now, we're all using Blue-Ray DVD burners, we should re-archive our content from CD to the newer format, and keep doing that over the years, so we're always up to date.
That could be the only way, but how many people do you think will actually do this?
What's the cheapest backup program that can save multiple versions of files out there for desktop PCs?
I don't know if it's the cheapest, but I use www.handybackup.com which allows you to time-stamp your backups and keep multiple versions of each backup...
Honestly, don't look for a cheap backup solution, look for the best one. :-)
So if, five years from now, we're all using Blue-Ray DVD burners, we should re-archive our content from CD to the newer format, and keep doing that over the years, so we're always up to date.
That could be the only way, but how many people do you think will actually do this?
Thats what I do. Had been backing up to CD since about 98 and moved to DVD earlier this year. Years from now, I will switch to what ever the new media is. Also, I bet if JPEG starts to go out of style, there will be a batch program that I can use to convert in bulk my files from jpeg to the newer format.
Additionally, I backup my pictures from home and leave them at my office on a regular basis. Less frequently I take a backup to my saftey deposit box. If disaster takes out my home/office/safety dep box, the fact that I lost all of my pictures will not be my biggest problem.
We're facing "a generation of lost images"
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