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#21
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Jeremy wrote:
wrote in message oups.com... You'll want to read this article: http://www.basic-digital-photography...al-photos.html Gary That article really did not address archival storage issues. It was written for digital novices. Digital imaging presents few problems when the files are going to be used/accessed over the short term, i.e., under 5 years. Whatever format and media type we use will still be readable in 5 years. The big concern is what happens to digital image files over the long term. The OP noted that he was barely able to access his 8-year-old digital files. It is apparent that some long-term strategy should be implemented if we want our images to be accessible for a longer term, even if we don't plan on their being viewable for, say, 100 years. So I guess that once you decide on which medium is useful in that sense, you archive the hardware that uses it? -- Frank ess |
#22
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"Frank ess" wrote in message ... So I guess that once you decide on which medium is useful in that sense, you archive the hardware that uses it? That technique is referred to as "The Museum Approach," and it is being implemented more often than one might expect. The archiving debate is somewhat like the "Film vs. Digital" one. There are ardent advocates on both sides. I used to think that it was no big deal, until an article in The "New Yorker" magazine opened my eyes to the risks of long-term digital storage. The United States Government itself has lost tons of data because the equipment to read it no longer is produced. Part of the 1970 census is gone, along with raw data from some of the NASA space missions. If the Government, with all of its planners and its financial resources, is unable to secure its data, how can we mere mortals be so certain that we won't have even bigger problems? Here is something hardly anyone knows: The National Archives had the task of storing all of the millions of emails that President Clinton and VP Gore had sent/received over their 8 years in office. How did the Archives approach the problem? They PRINTED the emails out on PAPER, then MICROFILMED them! Microfilm has an expected life of 500+ years, if stored under proper temperature/light/humidity conditions. The advice that Kodak is giving on its web site, about archiving important photographs by making and keeping PRINTS of them, may not be so bizarre after all! I became interested in Archival issues after having rescued a family album, from the 1940s, that had been chucked into the dumpster by a cleaning service that was hired to get my late aunt's condo ready for sale, when she had entered a nursing home. There were about 500 B&W photos, most of which I had never seen, that were saved. If those photos had been on CDs, tapes or other digital storage media, no one would have seen what was on them, and they would be on a landfill somewhere. (And, yes, I am scanning and digitizing them--so I am not opposed to digital archiving.) If we want to ensure long-term availability of our images, we need to think about possible retaining analog copies in addition to our digital originals. |
#23
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"Joseph Meehan" wrote in message news:bdhyd.11970 Digital storage is not forever. We often fail to appreciate the fact that CDs were NEVER developed to be an archival storage medium! There is an element of Russian Roulette when storing on CD or DVD. We already know that there is a wide variation when it comes to reliability of data (I just read something about "rotting dyes" in some CDs, that apparently degrade over time to the point that the entire disk becomes unreadable). Meanwhile, the guy that has shot film, on his cheap little Point & Shoot camera, and who has carefully stored the prints and negs in archival plastic album pages, ends up keeping his whole library of his life's pictures! Is that ironic, or what? |
#24
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Jeremy wrote:
"Joseph Meehan" wrote in message news:bdhyd.11970 Digital storage is not forever. We often fail to appreciate the fact that CDs were NEVER developed to be an archival storage medium! There is an element of Russian Roulette when storing on CD or DVD. We already know that there is a wide variation when it comes to reliability of data (I just read something about "rotting dyes" in some CDs, that apparently degrade over time to the point that the entire disk becomes unreadable). Meanwhile, the guy that has shot film, on his cheap little Point & Shoot camera, and who has carefully stored the prints and negs in archival plastic album pages, ends up keeping his whole library of his life's pictures! Is that ironic, or what? Ah such is life. Actually few people using point and shoot will end up with archival prints, they will be prints from the cheapest lab they can find, but they still may outlast many digital images. I don't remember who noted it, but I like the response that brought out the point that 90% of the messages here are really over worried about it and I will add that most of the images being worried about should be on the cutting room floor. -- Joseph Meehan 26 + 6 = 1 It's Irish Math |
#25
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Joseph Meehan wrote:
... every time you change formats, you loose some of that data. This is not a true statement. |
#26
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In article .com, dude17
@sacbeemail.com says... First concern is the availability of current file and data format. I save picturs as JPEG, which is the dominating format now, but I have no idea how long JPEG is going to be around. Same feelings about disk formats(ISO 9660 CD-ROM, HFS Mac, FAT/FAT32 Windows etc). JPEG is a very well documented format. That knowledge isn't going to go away. Same is true for TIFF, NEF, etc. There are a number of open source imaging programs that can parse JPEG, so I don't see that there will be a point where you simply can't get it. Of course, if you see 20 years from now that people are dropping support for it, find a program that can convert from it to whatever is the rage then, and batch convert them. While recording medium is advertised to last a century, I've had CD-Rs that was readable immediately after recording and went unredable a year later. They (recordables) are very sensitive to heat and sunlight. Recordable CD technology has been around for merely a decade and there simply isn't a track record to validate the longevity claims in real life. True. Use them as backups in addition to other forms of primary storage. In the event the recorded data lasts three decades, I'm not sure if there's a way to playback CD-Rs few decades from now. Don't throw away your current computer. You'll always have a way. :-) So what would you guys say is the best file type, media format and media type to use if I want them to be easily accessible for decades? The best, (which implies that you don't care about price, but only about realiability) is to use a storage medium that is fault tolerant, and gradually migrate it to newer forms of similar storage over time. The current way to go would probably be a hardware RAID 5 storage solution, where any single hard drive can go bad and yet ALL of the data is still immediately available, and the array will be rebuilt after you replace the failed drive. For the truly paranoid, RAID 6 (sometimes called ADG) can suffer two simultaneous drive failures, or if you have megabucks and want both redundancy and speed, a compound RAID such as 1+0 is the best, but requires far more drives. Apart from servers, the biggest issue with this is finding a chassis that can hold enough drives. |
#27
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"Jeremy" writes:
"David Dyer-Bennet" wrote in message ... I can go from jpeg to tiff to png without *any* loss of data. And I can go from hard drive to CD to DVD without any loss of data. Although I am not technically qualified to comment on this point, I would like to mention that I did read a rather technical article that discussed conversion of file formats. Apparently it IS possible to lose data when going from one format to another, because not all formats store the same amount of data. The other point that the writer noted was that it could be a real problem if an image was migrated from, say, Format "A" to Format "B," and then from Format "B" to Format "C," and later from Format "C" to Format "D." While this type of scenario might not be probable within the photographer's own lifetime, it is almost a certainty if images are refreshed over a span of several generations (human generations). You can lose data *as a result of a mistake*. Proper procedures check for that mistake, though, and declare the copy operation a failure. I was storing my digital files in FlashPix format up to just 3 years ago, believing that it was the closest thing to Kodak's ImagePac ("Photo CD") format. Then one day, all support for FlashPix was withdrawn and the format died. Almost overnight. I understand that PhotoShop no longer supports that format. What good will my CDs full of FlashPix images be in, say 25 years? WHY? A weird proprietary format with very limited support is *not* a decent candidate for archiving. Luckily, you have time to fix this; you still have the software that supports FlashPix and you still have your CDs. You just pay for your mistake with a bunch of time turning them into some reasonable format (TIFF, presumably) . I could go on, but you surely get the picture. We just do not know for sure what the future will bring, in terms of file formats. I understand that TIF is now on its 6th version (Adobe acquired it from Aldus when they bought the PageMaker program. Anyone remember Aldus?) Yes, exactly. And what mainstream tiff from 6 versions ago will any modern program fail to read? -- David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/ Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/ Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/ |
#28
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"Jeremy" writes:
"David Dyer-Bennet" wrote in message ... I can go from jpeg to tiff to png without *any* loss of data. And I can go from hard drive to CD to DVD without any loss of data. Although I am not technically qualified to comment on this point, I would like to mention that I did read a rather technical article that discussed conversion of file formats. Apparently it IS possible to lose data when going from one format to another, because not all formats store the same amount of data. The other point that the writer noted was that it could be a real problem if an image was migrated from, say, Format "A" to Format "B," and then from Format "B" to Format "C," and later from Format "C" to Format "D." While this type of scenario might not be probable within the photographer's own lifetime, it is almost a certainty if images are refreshed over a span of several generations (human generations). You can lose data *as a result of a mistake*. Proper procedures check for that mistake, though, and declare the copy operation a failure. I was storing my digital files in FlashPix format up to just 3 years ago, believing that it was the closest thing to Kodak's ImagePac ("Photo CD") format. Then one day, all support for FlashPix was withdrawn and the format died. Almost overnight. I understand that PhotoShop no longer supports that format. What good will my CDs full of FlashPix images be in, say 25 years? WHY? A weird proprietary format with very limited support is *not* a decent candidate for archiving. Luckily, you have time to fix this; you still have the software that supports FlashPix and you still have your CDs. You just pay for your mistake with a bunch of time turning them into some reasonable format (TIFF, presumably) . I could go on, but you surely get the picture. We just do not know for sure what the future will bring, in terms of file formats. I understand that TIF is now on its 6th version (Adobe acquired it from Aldus when they bought the PageMaker program. Anyone remember Aldus?) Yes, exactly. And what mainstream tiff from 6 versions ago will any modern program fail to read? -- David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/ Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/ Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/ |
#29
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"Jeremy" writes:
"Joseph Meehan" wrote in message news:bdhyd.11970 Digital storage is not forever. We often fail to appreciate the fact that CDs were NEVER developed to be an archival storage medium! There is an element of Russian Roulette when storing on CD or DVD. We already know that there is a wide variation when it comes to reliability of data (I just read something about "rotting dyes" in some CDs, that apparently degrade over time to the point that the entire disk becomes unreadable). Meanwhile, the guy that has shot film, on his cheap little Point & Shoot camera, and who has carefully stored the prints and negs in archival plastic album pages, ends up keeping his whole library of his life's pictures! Is that ironic, or what? For thirty years, or perhaps even longer sometimes if he's lucky! You are *greatly* over-rating the stability of color photograhic materials. Most of the color snapshots from the 60s are essentially gone now. -- David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/ Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/ Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/ |
#30
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