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How should I permanently store digital photographs?



 
 
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  #21  
Old December 22nd 04, 09:40 PM
Frank ess
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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  
Old December 22nd 04, 09:55 PM
Jeremy
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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  
Old December 22nd 04, 10:01 PM
Jeremy
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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  
Old December 22nd 04, 10:58 PM
Joseph Meehan
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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  
Old December 22nd 04, 11:45 PM
Tetractys
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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  
Old December 22nd 04, 11:59 PM
Randy Howard
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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  
Old December 23rd 04, 03:00 AM
David Dyer-Bennet
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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  
Old December 23rd 04, 03:00 AM
David Dyer-Bennet
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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  
Old December 23rd 04, 03:02 AM
David Dyer-Bennet
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Posts: n/a
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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/
 




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