CDs and DVDs for archival of images.

bought from J&R in NYC:
TDK
10 pack(box no frills; w/jewel cases) $4
30 pack spindle(no jewel cases) 80min 700mb 52x - $6(0.20c each)

Khypermedia
100 pack spindle 700mb 52x - $15(0.15c each)
50 pack spindle - $7(0.14c each)

I did get data read error on a couple of pics when viewing on a DVD
player. The names came up, but not the pics. On the computer, never
had this problem.

Today John A. Stovall commented courteously on the subject at
hand

The Library of Congress and the National Archives have
billions of /your/ dollars to develop and maintain the very
best in preservation. So, it doesn't surprise me at all
that it takes them 50 pages to say what I can in one
sentence - "don't touch the media and keep it in a cool,
dry place". Big deal!

No, they don't always know the best in preservation. You
should read the book _Double Fold_ about the disaster they
brought on the historical community by microfilming and
then destroying old news papers.

Both the Library of Congress and National Archives while
good are not always the last word in preservation.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/27/baker/
************************************************** ********

That was exactly my (sarcastic) point, John! They spend all
the money you and I will give them but don't have a clue what
they're, except to write 50 pages of drivel. It's like the
classic oxymorons like "military intelligence" and "postal
service". Maybe we should add "Libary of Congress
preservation". It's like what the National Archives have spent
so far, with no end in sight, to preserve the Star Spangled
Banner flag. Somebody should have thought about history 100
years ago when they literally let people cut a piece of the
flag out for souveniers!

Nobody intelligent, and I mean nobody, would /ever/ destroy
the originals of /anything/ after microfilming! Renting space
at a Bekins warehouse someplace (you know, where the nuclear
waste goes) is money well-spent compared to what their problem
is now - how the hell can they scan these newspapers to
digital, any format? The originals are gone.

Save a fire or other natural disaster, at least I still have
my slides and old snapshots if my digital media completely
goes belly up.

--
ATM, aka Jerry

Today Zed Pobre commented courteously on the subject at hand

All Things Mopar wrote:
the technology and continually update our backups as new,
proven stuff comes along. How many of us still have 8" or
5.25" or 3.5" disks we can't read anymore for any of a
hundred reasons?

There are only two reasons I have ever failed to get
information off of old archives: failure of the physical
media, or a proprietary, undocumented data format. Guard
against those two things, and you have storage for as long
as anyone cares about the data -- practically by
definition.

It has also been debated here what the best format is for
preserving graphics long-term. It certainly is /not/ PSD
or pspimage! If, for no other reason, Adobe or Corel might
be out-of-business when you try to retrieve your
irreplaceable images. Ditto, IMHO, for RAW/NEF. What do
you do if Canon, Nikon, Adobe, whomever stops supporting
your incantation?

Well, on the Canon side, I'd use UFRaw, which is Free
Software, and as such will be around much longer than I am.
Even if it isn't, the documentation on the CR2 format will
still be around, and someone could pretty easily rewrite
it. The Nikon encrypted white balance may be a problem,
but I haven't kept up with reports on how to work around
it.


Again, all of this is fine for today, as are TIFF, PNG,
JPEG, and others. Today, we have Macs and Windoze FAT,
FAT32, and NTFS. Who knows what there will be in 5, 10,
100 years?

If there are still people in a hundred years that care
about retrieving old data, then they'll have preserved the
documentation on all of the old open data formats. If
society has degenerated to the point where this information
has been lost, forget about retrieving your images and
worry about whether you have enough food to last you
through the winter.

Proprietary/undocumented formats may get you into trouble,
but I seem to recall that PSD is actually well documented
(I haven't personally checked on this, but it was the
impression I got), so it may be safe as well. Certainly,
there are non-Adobe programs that read and write PSD files.

I'm certainly not opposed to moving to the next available
physical storage format when it becomes available, just to
get around media failure and information density issues (if
I had to keep all of my current data on floppies, I'd have
lined every wall with shelves and had no room left), but if
you're going to trust the archivability stats on a CD, then
I wouldn't worry about not being able to find readers if
the storage format was open to begin with.


But, when I got my new Windoze XP Pro SP2 box last
October, the Windoze device driver crashes almost all the
time upon loading or attempting to read UDF-formatted CDs
or DVDs. And, while not as serious, SP2 also truncates
the 32-char UDF volume names to 15.
[...]

Anybody on this NG know what I'm talking about? Better
still, do you know how to fix it? I have to keep my old
SP1 box until/unless I find a cure and/or continually buy
more and more external HDs, and hope /they/ will read in
20 years!

I've never seen this problem, unfortunately. The only
problems I've ever had from the Windows side are the CD
driver locking up completely and refusing access to the
drive, or refusing to write a disc with asian characters in
the filenames. I would suggest copying the data to a hard
drive on the SP1 machine, moving it over to the SP2
machine, and then burning a fresh UDF disk from there to
see if you get something that works. It's possible that
SP1 was building slightly defective disks, for instance.

That's entirely true, Zed. I would add, though, that one
cannot prove a negative hypothesis by citing examples. All it
takes is /one/ exception to disprove your thesis. For example,
I have graphics made originally by Turbo Pascal under DOS 4.0
that are now irretrievable since I can't get it to run on XP
SP2. Someday, BMP, for example, may no longer be supported by
M$. Ditto for my HIRES graphics created with a graphics tablet
on my old Apple //e. Fortunately, I don't care about that any
more, but if I did, it'd be a tough roe to hoe to find a
converter.

And, to your point about proprietary formats, that's exactly
why one shouldn't trust their only copy of something important
to any graphics editor, such as PS CS or PSP or even the RAW
converter that came with your camera. Should whatever created
the files somehow now install on Bill the Gates better
mousetrap, and the developer can't or won't provide an upgrade
path, you are **** outta luck.

As to Windoze locking up, that's a good reason to create more
than one copy, preferably in a different format.

It's like the UDF crashes I'm getting right now in SP2. Maybe
I'll find a fix, and maybe I won't. At least, not for a long
time. I'm OK until my SP1 box dies, I suppose. Or, I can throw
money at the problem a different way and buy more and more
external HDs. Or, I could create a cross-reference between my
very long file names to ones that fit Joliet, and re-burn my
CDs and DVDs. That's a lot of "or's", so I'm still searching
for a way out of the woods on UDF.

--
ATM, aka Jerry

Joseph,

Point your browser at ...

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/news/849

Cheers,

Colin

Color film and color prints are made with organic dyes. Burnable CD
and DVD are made with organic dyes to encode the 1s and 0s. Kodak has
a list of things on a web site (simply do a Google search) which are
antagonistic to organic dyes, like PVC and high acid content paper and
wood! If you have to store color film and prints in the right storage
container, and you have to keep it out of the light to prevent fading,
it makes sense that you have to protect burnable CD and DVD in exactly
the same way to prolong the life. Some can fail in a few years, others
will last long time. Your Mileage May Vary.

I have a software CD that is about 3 years old, with Photoshop which
was bundled with some hardware I purchased. It was stored exactly like
all my other software, in a dark place, in the original sleeve, and
about a week ago it consistently failed when I tried to reload the
software onto my PC...I had a second copy and that worked just fine!
Someone else mentioned that they had a data DVD only a few years old
also go bad on them! So DVD is nowhere near as archival as a lot of
people think. And re-writable are worse than write-once media in their
susceptibility to data read problems.

Oh, forgot to mention that there are three classes of organic dyes used
in recordable DVD and CD. ONE of them is more archival than the
others. One clue is a gold color, but beware that some disks are
painted gold and do not use this dye!

All Things Mopar wrote:
Today Bruce Uttley commented courteously on the subject at
hand


I am about to archive images to optical media and in light
of recent debates surrounding the issue of CDs x DVDs in
terms of reliability I decided to do some research first
before choosing the media for the job.

[snip]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
has a site on the "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs". It
has a link to "Special Publication 500-252, October 2003",
a pdf titled "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs -- A Guide
for Librarians and Archivists".

This 50 page report has chapters on ensuring that your
digital content remains available: disc structure,
longevity, conditions that affect the media and cleaning.
With proper handling of the media, this report is
optimistic.

The site is at:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/index.html


IMHO, the only real alternative any of us have is to follow
the technology and continually update our backups as new,
proven stuff comes along. How many of us still have 8" or
5.25" or 3.5" disks we can't read anymore for any of a hundred
reasons?

Ditto for CD-R/RW and DVD-R/RW. They work fine today, and will
for years to come if cared for properly. And, if you use the
IT "grandfathering" method of keeping at least 3 sets, and
rotating the oldest out as the newest comes in.


Wow, you are a clone of Mark Conrad from c.s.m.s. From here on to a
bunch of bizarre tangents.

I'm not going to rely on CD-R because I've had too many failures even
with perfect handling.

Greg

--
"All my time I spent in heaven
Revelries of dance and wine
Waking to the sound of laughter
Up I'd rise and kiss the sky" - The Mekons

"All Things Mopar" wrote in message
...

IMHO, the only real alternative any of us have is to follow
the technology and continually update our backups as new,
proven stuff comes along. How many of us still have 8" or
5.25" or 3.5" disks we can't read anymore for any of a hundred
reasons?

Hopefully it isn't because we got rid of the drives that would read it
without transferring the data to a format we could still read. That would be
silly.

It has also been debated here what the best format is for
preserving graphics long-term. It certainly is /not/ PSD or
pspimage! If, for no other reason, Adobe or Corel might be
out-of-business when you try to retrieve your irreplaceable
images. Ditto, IMHO, for RAW/NEF. What do you do if Canon,
Nikon, Adobe, whomever stops supporting your incantation?

You get your 2006 raw converter software off the backup disk you stored it
on.



--
Apteryx

2006-02-09, Apteryx wrote:

It has also been debated here what the best format is for
preserving graphics long-term. It certainly is /not/ PSD or
pspimage! If, for no other reason, Adobe or Corel might be
out-of-business when you try to retrieve your irreplaceable
images. Ditto, IMHO, for RAW/NEF. What do you do if Canon,
Nikon, Adobe, whomever stops supporting your incantation?

You get your 2006 raw converter software off the backup disk you stored it
on.

And then it won't install because the trusted-computing platform/DRM
whatever we have then won't allow it. :-)

-peter

Today Apteryx commented courteously on the subject at hand

"All Things Mopar" wrote in message
...

IMHO, the only real alternative any of us have is to
follow the technology and continually update our backups
as new, proven stuff comes along. How many of us still
have 8" or 5.25" or 3.5" disks we can't read anymore for
any of a hundred reasons?

Hopefully it isn't because we got rid of the drives that
would read it without transferring the data to a format we
could still read. That would be silly.

I still have a under dash 8-track player, lot of good it'd do,
can't hook it up to a modern computer controlled radio without
blowing out an $800 audio system.

And, while I still have a 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drive on my
old PC, it still doesn't matter. The software necessary to
read the data won't run on XP, which was my point.

It has also been debated here what the best format is for
preserving graphics long-term. It certainly is /not/ PSD
or pspimage! If, for no other reason, Adobe or Corel might
be out-of-business when you try to retrieve your
irreplaceable images. Ditto, IMHO, for RAW/NEF. What do
you do if Canon, Nikon, Adobe, whomever stops supporting
your incantation?

You get your 2006 raw converter software off the backup
disk you stored it on.






--
ATM, aka Jerry