Creating Heritage by
Barry Cant, on Flickr
Something struck me the other day as I was sorting loads of Photos on my Server based storage. Here Marianne and I have thousands of photos which we're preserving for posterity and yet who will be to see them when we're deceased great-great grandparents?
Go back a hundred years and there are a reasonable set of pictures of our great-grandparents... usually taken by the town's pro. Then go back to our grandparents and you'll probably find a shoebox under the bed full of photos - many of them blurred, camera-shooked and all manner of conditions, but at least there is a record of sorts.
Where does that leave us? Who has prints these days? And usually all the blurred and out of focus shots are 'deleted'.
Simply stated.... Are we leaving enough imaging heritage for our grand-children and their progeny etc, to even know what we looked like?
I've still got every file I intentionally stored since the 80s. All transferred from media to media as formats become obsolete. There will always be a means to do this. Only a few months back I found some od Kodal Photo CDs... now defunct. I found some free software to convert them to TIFFs in around 10 minutes.
I have .IFF files from my old Amiga days, Music files from 20 years ago, all my photographic work since I went digital.
The fact is, I've lost more negatives than I've lost digital files. I have a robust 2 stage, fully redundant back up system. I've only ever unintentionally lost work, way back when like most people, I didn't have back up. It was a commercial job, and it cost me money and rep... I learned fast.
After a system search (including all servers and computers on the network) here's the findings.
Oldest music file = 1993
Oldest graphics file = 1987
Oldest raw file = 2002
Oldest Word file = 1986
These are file creation dates, so some of the media that's been digitised is even older than that. I've got scans from negative taken in the 70s that have outlived the negatives themselves. I've got digitised artwork from originals that have been lost or damaged. The oldest actual artefact created by me on this computer is a drawing I made as a child, long since lost, but survives on my home network. It's the cartoon I have as an avatar.... around 1982ish.
The oldest file on my system is nearly 30 years old. There's no reason to suspect it will not be here in another 30 years. People are becoming more and more digitally aware, and when I die, I can be pretty certain those I leave behind will be searching through my machine for photos, music and personal belongings. Whether THEY will take care of those files remains to be seen, but there's no real reason to suspect that we will lose images from our past because they're no longer on a piece of paper, or a negative.
Printing is not the answer, as most people's home ink jets are not archival stable any way, and will fade horribly in 20 years time. Only silver based prints have proven to stand the test of time (before the pedants start, yes, I'm aware there are other archival stable photographic methods - but they're not mainstream)
Archiving to optical media is a poor option too, as they can become problematic after a few years. The answer is to store them on your live, up and running system, and have decent, redundant back up. You'll know if you have a hard drive failure, and you'll do something about it. A CD in a drawer somewhere.... well, you've no idea if it works or not until you get it out years later - to late then though, as by that time, it will be the only copy because you THOUGHT you had backed it up. Back up isn't back up if it's only in one place.
There are enough people who know what they are doing to carry the digital legacy forward... don't worry. It's safer than a shoe box too.
and my reaction is the same as yours. 
