O.T.: (A little) Digital storage media shelf life. How long?

Greetings to all,

I had a hard drive go bad, or should I say the "coating" on the disks

began to crumble. At least that's how the technician called-in to fix

the problem described it. I noticed my files were corrupted,

unretrieveable, or missing entirely. I'm curious if this long-term

archival issue has been addressed before. I know everyone is slowly

migrating (maybe not so slowly) to digital. My concern is, in twenty-

years will we be missing an entire generation of images? No longer

can we sort through the proverbial shoe box looking for old, yellowed

prints or curled up, but printable negatives of Grandma and Grandpa.

Maybe I'm just grasping at straws to avoid going to the digital

solution. Any thoughts. Cheers,

 

Jim

The media itself has a limited shelf life. Somewhere in time, the original will be definitely lost. But, and that is different from classic photo material, a copy of the original can be made available without any loss at all (it's just a matter of cost, organisation etc.).

Archival storage has to be redefined for digital data. That's all.

This is one of the 'run and run' arguments. I've spent nearly twenty five years working with digital kit and I don't trust digital storage systems one little bit.

 

No doubt someone will tell me I'm wrong.

James,

 

There have been several recent, and many not so recent discussions of this topic on the Digital Imaging forum. You might want to look through them. There does not appear to be one approach that is clearly the best. But you will be able to read the range of ideas. My plan is to create lots of redundancy. And having a new computer loose one of its four drives when it was about two months old was sobering. Fortunately it had type one RAID and it was an easy matter to install a new drive and allow the system to rebuilt itself. I�ll always opt for computer systems that have that level of security, plus back up on a separate HD on a different computer, plus back up CD�s stored at another location.

 

Work safely!

 

Cheers,

 

Joe Stephenson

Never mind the media, what are you going to PLAY it on in 20 years? There are lots of old roll music "recordings" around, but now what?

 

Ray Hull

Even if the storage media lasts, technology evolution may make the data format or hardware to read it obsolete. Who knows what the prevalent storage media will be in 20 years? Remember card readers and tape storage? If you just stash it away and don't upgrade following the constant technological wave, your descendants may have nothing to look at in ... oh, say 2046.

Ray. . .Maybe the analogy should be, 78s, 45s, and LP vinyl records. At this point, you can still buy a turntable to play them on. On second thought, maybe your analogy is more correct. Regardless, we all understand if your OS requires an 8088 chip, you're probably SOL.

 

Thanks to all for the responces. Concensus seems to be "Murphy is alive and well". If it can fail, it will. Storage media is not achivable; at least not at this point. Current scanner technology available to most of us ($$) isn't quite at the point it can capture all the subtleties and nuance available on a MF frame of film. What concerns me is the average person buying digital technology, the soccer moms, the snap shooters don't realize an entire life of moments captured normally on film and passed on to their children and in some cases to their childrens children may be lost because no one is telling them their pictures aren't perminent. The days of going up in the attic and finding a box of treasured old photos may well be another quaint custom lost to technology. I find the loss of heritage very sad. It must be Monday morning blues getting me to wax philosophically.

 

Thanks to all.

 

Jim

Every individual piece of recording media has a limited lifetime. It's not a question of "if", but "when" it will fail. Don't conclude from this that digital _data_ must thus have a limited lifetime, it can live as long as someone is interested in taking care of it. Part of this process of taking care of it involves keeping redundant copies, periodically verifying integrity, migrating from old media to new media, migrating from old formats to new formats, recovering (from backups) when a piece of media fails.

 

Consider the difference between the lifespan of a book, as in a bunch of pages bound together, and the lifespan of the contents of those pages, the words that make up that book. The words can be preserved and presented in more current media and formats. A piece of literature written thousands of years ago can still live today, having inhabited a variety of "media" (different generations of printed pages), and "file formats" (having been translated over the years), without any trace of the original media surviving.

The rule is to migrate the data to a new device (disk/CD/DVD/whatever) before the format becomes obsolete, and keep backups anyway. The contents of a PC hard drive are easily copied to a new drive, or even a different PC.