CDs and DVDs for archival of images.

Today Zed Pobre commented courteously on the subject at hand

All Things Mopar wrote:
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.

I think you missed the point I was trying to make; I'm
noting simply that by sticking to open, documented formats
this problem is available. The TP graphics are most likely
a proprietary, undocumented format, so you're out of luck,
but that's not something that generalizes out to all
formats. It's by knowing the distinction that you can make
good decisions about what formats are safe for archival.


Someday, BMP, for example, may no longer be supported by
M$.

This wouldn't matter. BMPs are just simple bitmaps with a
known, well-documented format. They'll remain convertable
pretty much indefinitely, whether or not MS supports them.
You may have to go to a Free Software solution in that
case, but they'll remain convertable. The source code to
"convert" (which handles them today), for instance, isn't
going to go away, though you may end up having to install
either a Unix-like OS or a Unix enivronment such as Cygwin.


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.

Not familiar with that format. There are a bunch of old
Apple II fans that made various emulators and
reverse-engineered most of the old formats, so I suspect
you'd find those easier to handle than you might think.


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.

... correct, but you're still missing the point that some
of those formats are *documented*, so you aren't relying on
that specific piece of software. I'll be able to read the
CR2s from my Canon pretty much indefinitely because the
format is well documented and there is already Free
Software available to handle it. Even if that software
were to go unmaintained for so long that it stopped running
on every OS in use, the source code would be available and
thus would be a fairly simple matter to fix. Even if that
were infeasible, the documentation of the format would
likely be around, making it fairly simple to rewrite.


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.

Another possibility is to set up a file server running
Linux, and use its UDF support to read the disc and make
the contents available over a local network.

Zed, we really do agree, just from differing viewpoints. When
I wore the clothes of a younger man, I used to enjoy graphics
programming and could do format conversion to a limited extent
when they were documented. These days, if I can't get it
through shareware or commercial, it don't help me.

But, we're basically arguing about what will happen when the
sun burns out and everybody freezes to death. You and I will
be dead then, and we'll be dead before TIFF and JPEG die, and
likely dead before any reasonable backup media will overtake
optical.

Thanks for sharing your views and your information.

--
ATM, aka Jerry