Photo Preservation in the Digital Age

[Pookeyhead]

Not sure where else we can go with this.


[edit]

BTW.. that's aimed at both of us. We have different opinions. I'll not change your views, and vice versa. Shall we agree to disagree?

 

[Steve Smith]

Wow... picking up on my typos? That's pretty desperate.

Not just yours. It is the most misspelled word on the internet!

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling


Steve.

 

[PhotographyBuff]

And even if I did consider my photographs to be of any artistic value, other artists don't have the benefit of backing up. If you work in watercolours, oils, sculpture, mixed media, etc. the artwork is a one off. There is no way to back it up - just make another one! (until Epson makes a canvas printer with oil paints in the ink cartridges and a virtual brush stroke emulator).

Steve.

Great observation. The same would be true of sculpture. However, music composition can have backup (score copies). The same is the true of literature.

However, maybe high resolution photos of paintings can count as some form of backup. But then we come back to the original question: how to back up photos!!!

 

[PhotographyBuff]

No one has mentioned magnetic tape backup. I read somewhere that it is the longest surviving type of storage at 30 years (unfortunately can't find the link).

Also, the following link says that Verbatim Gold Archival DVD-R has "a minimum durability of 18 years and an average durability of 32 to 127 years (at 25C, 50% humidity)":

http://www.linuxtech.net/tips+tricks/best_safe_long-term_data_storage.html

 

[Jan K.]

Tape is so *not* interesting for home users as backup media... and I doubt very few use them. Did myself back in the 90's, but then harddiscs were expensive...

Get acouple of internal discs for two seperate backups and copy to one external. Then once every ~fifth year, you upgrade/replace anyway.

There's really no point in having one kind of backup and gambling on keeping that "forever". Instead refresh the media ever so often...

 

[Alanem]

No one has mentioned magnetic tape backup. I read somewhere that it is the longest surviving type of storage at 30 years (unfortunately can't find the link).

Also, the following link says that Verbatim Gold Archival DVD-R has "a minimum durability of 18 years and an average durability of 32 to 127 years (at 25C, 50% humidity)":

http://www.linuxtech.net/tips+tricks/best_safe_long-term_data_storage.html

You won't pick them up for a fiver a cake though will you. I use a USB caddy and two 1TB SATA discs to back up from my PC's internal drive. If the house burns down I'll lose it all but I won't lose anything if only one drive fails, or even two but since I'm not running a business I'm OK with that. It's not just pictures though, all my music is backed up too, I've got DVD films from when they first came out (early adapter) and about 5-10% are unplayable - some kind of chemical reaction caused them to rot, have a read of this,
[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot"/URL]

Alan