Annika1980 writes:

This question got me to thinking. I started shooting digitally about
10 years ago, but many of my early efforts (taken with a 2.1MP Kodak)
are stored away on some CDs somewhere or in an old hard drive I don't
even have easy access to these days. I do have pretty much everything
from late 2002 on, which is when I got my Canon D60. The only problem
is storage space since they take up a few Terabytes.

I used to shoot quite a lot of film as well and I still have many
negatives and slides, very few of which have been scanned. I don't
even think my old scanners and software will work on my new computer.

I wonder how many of these images will still be around in another 10
or 20 years?
An even scarier thought is what if something happens to the drive(s) I
have them backed up on?
Poof! The last 10 years of photography gone forever. But on the
other hand, if I haven't used or profited from those pix by now, what
does it matter? Very few of the photos I've taken have been seen by
anyone besides me, despite the fact that I post a good number of
photos online. So who really cares if they go away?

Most of my old negatives were never seen by anybody but me, either.

Let's see; oldest image on my computer might be...probably this
http://dd-b.net/cgi-bin/picpage.pl/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/1956?pic=mdb-alb01-00025.
1956, taken by my mother, scanned by me from a print.

The oldest photo I took on my website is probably
http://dd-b.net/cgi-bin/picpage.pl/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/1964?pic=ddb%203-10,
summer of 1964. Shot with my Pixie 127, and scanned (from the negative)
rather later).

The oldest digital capture I have up on my website is probably
http://dd-b.net/cgi-bin/picpage.pl/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/2000/Pittsburgh%20Feb%202000?pic=02230003,
Feb. 2000.

So far as I'm aware I still have every digital photo I've ever taken
that I didn't deliberately delete.

The digital versions can fairly easily be maintained forever -- but
somebody has to be paying attention routinely. All mine live on the
running hard drives on the server (mirrored pairs there), plus are
backed up on three external drives that I take off-site in turn. Plus I
have optical disks of most of the photos, most of them old; but I'm not
throwing them out, they're another string to the recovery bow if things
go pear-shaped.

Of course, if I stop paying attention, the photos probably won't last
that long. Digital archives properly managed can be eternal, but
digital data doesn't do very well under benign neglect. And
historically nearly everything we have from the ancient world got to us
by lasting through at least a century or two of neglect.

But for my lifetime, if the house burns, I'll lose the physical books
and the physical photos, but not the digital books and the digital
photos (including scans of the physical photos).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, ; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info