This afternoon, Emily and I were looking through photo albums from when I was a young child. One of many thoughts that occurred to me during the course of flipping through photos nearly a quarter-century old is the enduring quality of such media. Digital photography is a lot cheaper and more convenient, but it is also likely to be more ephemeral. Who has confidence that their digital photos will endure for twenty or thirty years? Who has the backups, and on media with that kind of lifespan? Neither burned CDs nor hard drives can really be counted upon for such a duration.
People may age may be the last generation to commonly have baby photos to look at in old age. Someone should offer a service where digital files are pressed onto bronze in file formats that will still be readable decades or centuries hence.
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How long do burned CDs and hard drives last?
Also, are prints from digital cameras as durable as those from film cameras?
*Remembering pictures of Milan running around wildly, hair sticking out all over, perpetually pantsless*
It is important that we preserve moments in our childhood that help to answer questions about ourselves later on in life.
metafilter recently pointed towards an article which I can’t now find about how it costs 12,000 $ a year to store a digital master print of a film, compared to 500$ for a film on negative spools.
Paradoxically, the best way to store digital pictures may very well be transfer them to k-14 process slides. Yellow, the least stable colour, degrades on 20% after 180 years. (Compare to E6 slides, 30 years on look like garbage).
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
By ScuttleMonkey on new-zombie-films
A new study shows that storing the digital master record of a film costs much more than storing archival prints. “To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is ‘born digital’ — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.”
Original NY Times article
“If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.”
It is important that we preserve moments in our childhood that help to answer questions about ourselves later on in life.
What questions could those photos help to answer?
As time goes by, we can store more data on media of the same physical size or cost. Thus, we need fewer and fewer discs as time goes on, if we were to backup our entire photo collection every two years. Rolling backups are the solution!
Rolling backups are certainly a possibility, but they require a fair bit of organization. Also, the amount of work involved in making the backup increases with the number of files, as well as their diversity of types.
A truly archival storage option would be better, at least for the kind of photos people really care about.
Rosetta Disk Designed For 2,000 Years Archive
By timothy on that’ll-do-for-now
Hugh Pickens writes “Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog ‘human-readable’ scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. ‘This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth,’ says Oliver Wilke. ‘If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations.’”
Digital Storage To Survive a 25-Year Dirt Nap?
By timothy on lazarus-brand-only-goes-a-few-days
AlHunt writes “I’ve been tasked with finding a way to bury digitally stored photographs in a small underground time capsule to be opened in 25 years. It looks like we’ll be using a steel vessel, welded closed. I’ve thought of CDs, DVDs, a hard drive, or a thumb drive — but they all have drawbacks, not the least of which is outdated technology 25 years from now. Maybe I’ll put a CD and a CD-ROM drive in the capsule and hope that the IDE interface is still around in 25 years? Ideas and feedback will be appreciated.”