Longevity of digital photos?

man in hat

man in hat

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Mike Tilley
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When my grandad died, a good few years ago now, I was amazed and surprised to find out that he had been a keen Photographer. We discovered boxes of old pictures and negatives, some of which, though not taken by him, were 90 years old and still looked almost perfect today.

My question is how long will digital pictures last? I know we can store them on CD/DVD's or other digital media, however none of us know how long these will last as the technology hasnt been around that long...I have CD's burnt 10 years ago which I cant read today. Also technology moves on...will we be able to read todays digital media in 20 or 30 years time?

Is there any time proof way of storing the pictures I take today for 100 years or more so that one day perhaps a box of my own pitures will be discovered and looked over in awe the same way I did with those old Photo's and negatives of my grandads.
 
Print them off and take photographs of them using film?
 
:lol:
i would say that storing online would be the way forward be it on a private volt. then the hosting company will keep it on the lates devices and backed up as well :D
 
I don't think it's an issue at all. A lot of people now use online storage, and there'll never be a problem with older file formats being recognised. Newer software will be able to recover older formats.

Usually it's a case of the media (in your example a CD) rather than the file being damaged. I don't rely on compact or floppy disks for backup, and I'm reasonably confident that if I don't abuse my hard disks they'll last a long time. If they fail, I'll replace them. Of course, backing up online solves that, short of some kind of worldwide disaster destroying most of the int0rwebz!
 
a very good point you have brought up there mih ive been thinking this myself looking through my old pics , the only solution i think maybe to use archival discs although they are expensive but how much are your pics worth ?
yours gwh
 
Interesting thread :thumbs:

I am pretty certain that any photos stored on CD/DVD or even HDD will not last indefinately :( Like you, I have CD's that I burned only a few years ago that are now only useful as coasters. It is for this reason, and because I too would like there to be a permenant record of my photography long after I'm gone, that I print all the work I am proud of, as well as storing it digitally :) You can't help thinking that someone finding your old external hard drive in the loft isn't going to have the same impact as finding a box of 90 year old prints to look through :shrug:
 
it depends in 50 years HDD wont be around there will be some sort of cell drive i would think so a HDD would be like finding a rusty can full of pics just a diferent genarations perspective
 
From what I have found over the years & working in retail + photography the online way is to store your photos as prints & negatives (if you images are digital get them changed to negs)
CD's & DVD's only have a minimum of 2 year life, Hard drives don’t last forever, if they fail, or get a virus, get wet and a million other things your images could be lost. Online storage is not guaranteed. What if the company goes bust? You have got no way or entitlement to your files.
 
I can't answer for how the stored data will fair, but so far as prints go, there's no reason why your digital prints shouldn't last as long as your grandad's or even longer.

The thing which eventually fades prints is ultra violet light. If you frame your prints nicely with the back sealed against the ingress of dust and airborne pollutants, and hang it on a wall well away from a window, or at least where it will never get direct sunlight, they will outlast you with no probs at all.

The other safe way is store them in a dark drawer or cupboard where they're kept flat. Albums should be a safe bet although some album papers and adhesives used in years gone by have been found to have an adverse effect.

A few years back, the prophets of doom were all warning that bubble jet prints would start to fade in 3 years, but I have prints made around ten years ago with no sign of fading at all and so do many of my customers .

Top end Epson printers on appropriate papers are claimed to have archival lives of 100 years for glossy and 200 years for matte, and that's out of doors in Western daylight, so the longevity of conventional film prints has long been surpassed by digital, or at least resistance to UV light has.

The vast majority of prints I get to restore have either faded from exposure to sunlight, or are horrendously creased due to being stored loose in drawers along with loads of others. We all do it of course. :shrug:
 
Take regular backups! Keep 2 copies of your backup media, keep one at home somewhere safe and keep the other well away from your home. At your mum and dads, safety deposit box at the bank etc etc.

I wouldn't put all my faith in flickr or the likes, as I have had images go missing off there, or become unavailable at least.

You should make backing up your pc a routine you adhere to religiously. I have worked in IT 10 years and I tell you this, your hard drive can fail at ANY time and its gone. End of story. Even data recovery co wont get your data back for certain, and they'll charge you a fortune for trying.

Things are about to get a bit easier for us though, 400 gb blueray dvd's are soon to be released which will make things much easier.
 
At the moment i have mine backed up on both my PC's at home and a auto backup to my Server that is hosted in a data center, so i have 3 coppies of everything flying round :D abit of over kill but i dont mind its all automated so i dont need to do anything
 
Some interesting response :)

Trouble is I class myself as a bit of a luddite (can you be a luddite at 35? Answers on a postcard). Even though I love modern technology in alot of respects I just dont trust it! I would never trust online storage with anything that I consider dear. Hard discs do fail and sometimes catastrophically. And from my own experience with CD's and floppy discs of old...well theres 3 PCs in this house and not one can read the old 5 1/4 or 3 1/2" discs....

Modern storage methods seem to be moving towards solid state which is great, no moving parts, but again the longevity of these is unknown!

The only conclusion I could come up with is, as someone mentioned above, to get my pics printed photographically onto paoer and negative....So does that ultimately mean I should bin my DSLR and go back to a method that is proven to last quite well for 100yrs plus???
 
Actually, you have hit upon a subject which I do ponder a lot on. Okay, digital technology is now within easy reach of everyone, and with digital cameras you can snap, snap, snap away to your heart's content. Make a mistake? That's alright, take another picture, or manipulate the image using a half-decent paint program.
However, the problem is that it is just as easy to lose all your digital images as it is to create them in the first place. Oh yes, I've been there about 5 years ago where I've been putting a load of digital images onto a rewriteable CD, then one day, suddenly I couldn't put any in without getting that dreaded "Unable to read D Drive" message, and at the same time, I couldn't access it. In other words, I've lost 2 year's worth of early digital images.
Currently I put all my stuff into a removable HDD, but like what everyone said, eventually it'll break down, and it'll also get to a point where perhaps technology of the future will render current technology as obselele and incompatible (like what DOS is to Vista and VHS is to DVD and Blu Ray).
This is why I think traditional media such as books and even film based cameras is going to be around for a long time.
So in summary, digital images are great for short term use and storage and you can upload them to a host site. However, try and access them in, say, 100 year's time and you'll have problems.
Traditional media such as books and films will be around long since you've shuffled off your mortal coil. However, you could lose them all in one go in a house fire!
 
As digital is simply a long series of 0s and 1s, I find it easiest to simply write these down for any image I want to keep then get that book bound in case I need to reproduce it sometime. Of course I have 3 version, one here, one at parents' and one stored in a vault in New York. It's surprising how quickly you can write down a sequence of over 12million digits when you get the hang of it :)

My own simple back-up is to save them all to DVD and external HD too, and, here's the real key to it all... not worry about it

I suppose in 5 years or so I could start to check them all, and back-up to the then latest media; and simply repeat that every 5 years too

:D

DD
 
We've already got a few ways to recover data from corrupted cards and alike, I'd imagine it won't be to long before these devices come as standard on all operating systems, as permanent and secure way to cover all failing or infected bits and bobs ..

I agree that two external HDs backups is probably the best choice for now.
 
and back-up to the then latest media; and simply repeat that every 5 years too
Click to expand...
That's the method, imagine finding a USB hard drive in the loft in 90 years time. What would you plug it into ?

If you found a laser disc these days you would have trouble finding a player, and if you don't know what's on the disc is it worth the bother ?
 
Work sent me on a basic archive keeping course a while ago and the topic of longevity of digital archives did come up. There are some pretty stable ways to store digital information, but they're not too practical. I was told the best way is simply to store on CD, but to make copies and throw out the old ones every few (5?) years. They also recommended storing files as open source file types, which will make accessing older files considerably easier in years to come once the software they were created with has gone out of use.
 
john-oh said:
That's the method, imagine finding a USB hard drive in the loft in 90 years time. What would you plug it into ?

If you found a laser disc these days you would have trouble finding a player, and if you don't know what's on the disc is it worth the bother ?
Click to expand...


Thing is though, the data on the laser disc would probably still be intact if you did find a way to read it ...the HD on the other hand, standing un-powered for fifty years, internal battery flat, no file indexing to refresh the data.... 1's fade and become 0s ...what pictures!

Solid sate is slightly more reliable, less moving parts scraping against each other, less power required to keep it indexed ... but, eventually, without power.... those 1's still fade to 0's over time.

Horrible thought init. :gag:
 
At least it means that there will be permenant work - as everything will need to be reshot time and time again!
 
Interesting topic about media and technology.

There are various ways of tackling this, but one thing is to make a tiered archival approach.


Lets assume we are being rather precautious.

1) Get a second hand PC with RAID 1 array hard drives lets say 1TB of space.

2) Replicate all data on a weekly/monthly/quarterly period, depending on the criticality and importance of your photos onto the second PC, via an external usb disk or networks.

3) Archive the data from the second hand PC to two sets of optical media e.g DVD and keep them in two locations for DR.

4) Assuming you have internet connection, archive the pictures to an external ISP.

5) Deploy an archival policy on the pictures.

In 4 years time, check the latest backup technologies and perform a media migration of your current DVD/optical media to the latest storage medium.

The key to this is to ensure you have a working platform that both supports legacy hardware and future hardware and that you migrate data from one form of storage to another...

Cheers,

Andy
 
Or you could just take them on film to start with and leave in a cardboard box in the loft for 50 yrs....ahem :D
 
jono2002 said:
CD's & DVD's only have a minimum of 2 year life
Click to expand...

Tosh.

I dare say some dvds and cds have a short life but then so do some photographic prints and negatives. It comes down to choosing the correct media to begin with and then storing that media properly.
If you take a little care in choosing the dvd media you use it can and will have an indefinate lifespan. A very little research on the net will clue you in to what is considered good media for long term storage.
If you convert everything to prints and negatives, who's to say they will be developed or stabilised properly or that the paper is of good quality?
Then you have to physically store the media you've chosen if you stick anything in a shoe box on top of the water heater in the loft (neg, print or dvd) it's not likely to be useable in fifty years.
 
The point is though that given proper storage, film negatives and paper have already proven to be a long life medium. My concern is that with all the technology today, which is sooo fast moving, nothing has yet had the chance to stand the test of time.

In 20 years will the average PCs even come with a CD/DVD drive???

Dont get me wrong, I love digital photography and the flexibility that it gives me to distibute and play around with images. I just worry for the hundreds of pics I have of family growing up and friends having fun that at some point they will be lost.
 
Thats why its useful to still keep a PC that is from this era :)

Seriously, I still have a 386SX which is functional to this day with 5.25" floppy drive etc, and it still reads some of my old data which is nearly 20 years old...

Food for thought.
 
The problem with advocating a return to film medium is that of all the thousands of images I've restored in over 20 years, it's always been from a print. I can't recall a single instance where the negative was still in existence - they've either been lost or binned long ago. Many will have been professionally taken, and of course the pro retained the negs along with copyright, but usually by the time I get the print, the pro has long ceased trading and probably dropped off the perch too. What happens to all those negatives then? - I suspect I know the answer. ;)

The rest are snaps of varying quality taken by Joe Public, and I can only assume that the value of the negs was never considered at the time, as invariably, they're nowhere to be found. :shrug:
 
I'm with CT, most old images that are found are in print form as the negatives are put somewhere safe and then lost in time. I think the reason is quite obvious -a print is the form that people can actually look at easily.

My short term soloution is to store all images on 2 drives but if I'm honest my long term archiving strategy is to print professionally all the images I really like and put them on display - I think this is the best way of keeping them for future generations.
 
I do back up my whole computer, photos and all, to an external hard drive (and crucial things to CD or DVD too) but I also get prints made every 6 months or so or after a couple of trips or events. I look through the digital photos, choose my top 100 or so that show where I've been, what I've done, the people with me or just photos I really like get them printed and put them in good old fashioned albums.
Since spending a long time sorting through my nan's photos a few months ago I have also started putting dates, locations and names on the back to help the people that I hope will discover them in 90 years time!
 
The integrity of digital storage could well prove to be the Achilles heel of digital photography in the long run, which is why I suspect the hard copy will again prove to be the winner in the end - time will tell of course.
 
It seems that I have a slightly different archive/backup procedure to most people..........
Each "new" storage facility gets larger and quicker and cheaper than the preceding one was when it came out. Once a "new" type of storage becomes common and (relatively) stable, all my previous archive gets transfered to that medium, but I still keep the original.

I have info on floppy discs, that has then been copied to CD, and then to DVD, and also to external hard drives............ So if my CDs do become unreadable in a couple of years time it will not matter, etc etc.

I am now looking at copying all my pics that are on "old" IDE drives onto SATA ones. As the new technology becomes available I will use it, but I bring my archive with me - it does not just get left, because with digital storage you cannot tell from looking at it if it is corrupt or not.
 
Well, in the IT world we have copies on tape, disk media and CD/DVD. The CD/DVD is for speed/ease of recovery, tape for life. You just have to store these medium correctly.
 
I'm currently relying on DVD/CD and flickr. Developing certain pictures from time to time. Hopefully blu ray will come down in price and be more of an everyday item soon and I'll start switching to that.

It really would be a shame to lose all those family pictures and what not.
 
On the whole I'm not too worried about my work being available beyond my lifetime, particularly as I will have no relatives to leave it to. If I would like it to live on though my personal preference would be as archival inkjet prints. The estimated lifetime of these is now very long indeed. If you want to look into archival storage to make the most of their longevity go have a look at

http://www.secol.co.uk/

The quality of their stuff (and its pedigree) is very high. I've bought the CD sleeves and boxes.

My experience is that CDs kept in cool, dry, dark and vertical conditions is that failures are very low indeed. In fact I have a lot of CDROMs from back to 1997, long before the archival types came in and I have never had a failure. The only ones which could be described as dodgy ( I have run error detection programs on them) are a couple of Kodak PhotoCD which I have since copied.

Recording to film is all very well but what is the longevity of colour film? Kodachrome and Technicolor are pretty good but soon neither will be available. Some years ago I heard small film producers bemoaning the fact that E6 movie prints were rotting fast and a lot of recent movies would soon be lost. This was before the advent of digital storage of course but it is a pointer for the potential performance modern film that does not use archival dyes. B/W is another story of course.

I'll just continue to use the storage medium of the moment and try to remember to keep making copies.
 
There are CD-Rs around now that claim to be archival quality and last for hundreds of years if stored correctly.

I think CD-R is the best bet for archiving. With a stable dye formulation, there's no reason why your pics shouldn't last longer than you :)

As regards file format, I would go with the original RAW files produced by the camera. This is the electronic equivalent of a negative. Providing you've used a mass-market SLR by one of the major makes, your CR2, NEF files etc. will always be able to be read, just like MS Word DOC files. There are millions of these files in existence, and there will always be a demand for software that reads them.

A.
 
As someone relatively new to digital photography, there are very few of my photographs that I would be gutted if they were lost.
The only exceptions that I can think of are family photos (children growing up, Grandparents and Parents, that kind of thing).
If they were important or good or both then I have at least one print in an album...just the same as film days.
As an aside, I do not have any computer equipment still working after 10 years so committing photos to hard disks would have been pointless in the past without constantly copying them to new equipment every 2-3 years (if they could still be read).
 
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