Digital Ice Age.

Just want to share an interesting article

 

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4201645.html

Interesting, thanks.

 

Who *hasn't* been bit by a hard-drive crash or a CD gone bad?

 

Stuff I really, really want to save, whether text or images, gets printed and filed away somewhere safe.

 

I don't consider CDs safe, long-term. Not yet.

There's an interesting discussion going on in the Digital Cameras forum that's related, regarding Adobe DNG and the survivability of RAW files. I posted the "Digital Ice Age" article link there.....

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Manoj, what's interesting in that article TO YOU?

 

ME? I have no problem accessing ALL my digital archives from the early 1980s on, but as a thoughtful, self-supporting person, I do not expect Microsoft or Intel to maintain compatibility across generations of gear. I fully expect to be responsible to do that for myself. I think we're seeing people who did not think ahead who get surprised when things go wrong and only after a catastrophy realize that no one but themselves is looking out for them, and that's been happening long before computers hit the marketplace, and has nothing to do with computers. I do not expect food manufacturers to look out for my diet or health, nor do I expect newspapers or book publishers to really care about my education, nor car manufactureres or highway designers to really care about my safety or keeping me from getting lost, and so on ... get the picture?

 

Anyway, Manoj, why did YOU find that article interesting to you?

 

-- Click! Peter Blaise, Minolta Rokkor Alpha DiMage Photographer

.

 

William, got a link to your referenced discussion? Thanks!

Great article. Thanks for posting. I've also been stung by this. Virtually every image I've taken since the late 1980's is gone. The file or CD ROM is unreadable, even though I took great care to use the best software, using brand name drives, and even gold discs (which don't matter apparently). Anymore I have everything on mirrored drives.

I've never lost a file since I started using computers. I regularly back up and migrate. My image files are on two hard drives (one of which is never on except during backup) and two DVDs, one of which is sent out of the area. I keep lower res copies of everything on a web site that is hosted elsewhere.

 

I am missing a whole era of negatives, from a time when I was in school and fairly transient from year to year and during the summers. All the negatives from before I was 26 years old are gone. I have prints of some of them, and I have scanned the prints to make sure I have copies.

 

A major earthquake here in California could result in a complete loss of the rest of my negatives, but I have scanned the important ones since the digital files reside in multiple locations. I figure the digital files will always be recoverable.

Agreed 100% that some types of catastrophe could take out negs. A fire at my home would cost me half my negs, a fire at my girlfriend's would take out half, and a simultaneous fire at both places I'd lose everything. Well, not everything.... even though I don't trust CDs as much as I trust negs, I have a body of work that is on CDs that are scattered around my area. Some at home, some at work, some at parents' home, some at g/f's home. Since we're tens of mile apart, it would take huge disaster to take them all out.

 

But barring a disaster in the form of flood, fire, or earthquake (at multiple distant locations simultaneously) - negs seem to hold up better to long-term storage than CD's do. So far.

 

Loosing negs has been extremely rare for me, while finding corrupt files on CDs or hard drives has happened far more often. Good news is that since I have the negs, I have been able to re-scan any digifiles that have become corrupt, losing only some time. :):)

 

I'm skeptical that the problem of long-term storage of digital media, as well as organized retrieval of same, will be solved soon. It'll be solved, but not soon.

 

Come to think of it, Greenfield Village has some Edison recordings from the earliest days of the record player. Wouldn't it be funny if we moved from CDs to a way of saving digital 1 and 0 on vinyl records stored in environmentally controlled places? Thomas Edison would be proud....

Shoot - we'd still have to worry about software and operating systems going obsolete, wouldn't we..?

 

Sigh....

I think it was only about 12-13 years ago that I bought the first of the Sony digital still cameras - the very first "Mavica". Strictly NTSB video format, storage on a little floppy about 1/2 the size of the (then) standard 3.5" floppy disk. Seems archaic now, but it was state of the art for the time (I thought it was a perfect replacement for a slide projector in my classroom). So, where is that format today? For that matter, the only reason to have a 3.5" floppy now is as a boot disk in case your computer crashes. And 5" floppies? Anybody remember those? If you found one, could you find a drive for it? All this, in the last 15 years......

 

(Never mind my first computer (1977), the Radio Shack TRS-80, Model 1: A whopping 64K RAM, tape data storage on a cassette recorder. Ooooohhh!)

William Kahn,

 

I still have one of the Mavicas! Mine takes 3.5" disks, and could fit 10-20 photos on that disc. We have a newer one at work, that takes just a small number of images on the 3.5" disk.

 

I do remember the 5" floppies, too. Last one I owned I cut it open with my 12 y/o son a year ago, to show him what was inside. Great fun - not much to them. Oh, I almost forgot - the 3.5" floppy was the replacement for the 5", and should have been "forever.". Then came CDs, which are also forever - until you find corrupt files on yours, and become a skeptic.

 

I've been in CAD (computer aided design) for about 20 years, and in that time seen many computer crashes and loss of data. Usually the data lost by a company isn't much - a week, a day. But when it's private users, I've seen so many people that should have known better really get bit.

 

Digital, in all things, is the way of the future; and inevitable. But disappearing data hasn't been 100% solved yet.

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica">According to

Wikipedia</a>, the first Mavica was MVC-FD5. It recorded still

images in JPEG format (extremely rare format, hehehe) onto a 3.5"

floppy (another rarity!). The readers for 3.5"

floppy discs are widely available right now in used and new

condition, and

will be available used for at least another 20 years. That's plenty

of

time to transfer your images onto a better medium if you really care

about those

data! If you don't care, then, well, D'oh! If you don't care about

paper records, they disappear just as fast as the digital!</p>

 

<p>Now regarding the video format of MVC-FD5. Are you sure MVC-FD5

was capable of capturing video? I wonder how many minutes it could

store on a floppy disc! And what is NTSB format? Are you sure you

did not misspell NTSC? NTSC is a popular video format in North

America. NTSB is... National Transportation Safety Board? Or am I

missing something here? Maybe that's why you can't find out how to

read an NTSB file...</p>

WIth the digital age, many people do not make photos of their pictures, but instead view them on their monitors or send them via e-mail to others. How many of these people even backup their drivers, let alone keep them fresh by moving the pictures onto the latest medium. I believe we will have a gap in today's world where we will not have photos to show grand children of how life was in 2006. I can go back into boxes and retrieve photos of my grand parents and see how simple life was back then. I have not confidence that our digital photos will be around for the majority of people in the next 50 years.

Eugene, NTSB is Not Too Sharp, Bubba. OK, I made that up. You're right - it's NTSC. I sold my Mavica over a year ago at a garage sale and I don't recall the model number exactly, but I'm pretty sure there was a "2" in it. I'm also sure it was the first model Sony marketed. Wikipedia could actually be wrong....

Can digital files be saved forever? Yes, but how effectively and at what cost?

 

The company I currently work for has 19 factories in the US alone, and all the necessary admin offices besides, and several hundred worldwide. Let's just look at the US. EVERY DAY we run a complete system backup of the entire network. That includes every file from the on-site server room(s) of each location. Those backups are stored on removeable media and digital copies made to be sent off-site at one of 7 off-site server farms distributed across the nation, and each backs up the other.

 

WE STILL LOSE DATA. Our applications change and the information is not always compatible, many times not even for newer revisions of the same application! Servers lose power. Servers fail. ...and storage is not cheap. Nationwide, we spend several million dollars per year on data storage and upkeep. That doesn't include paying the people who do the real work of this every single day.

 

WE STILL LOSE DATA.

 

I'm very happy for anyone who hasn't been bitten by a hardware failure or a storage media failure, or exorbitant storage and maintenance fees for files that go unused indefinitely. I wish I could be impressed by burning my files onto a thirty-nine cent CD.

 

I mean no offense to anyone. Just my own personal rant. I hope my negatives are usable in 60 years, and I hope there is somebody alive who would want to use them for something. Digital files? If I think it's really important I make a copy and put it in a file. I have learned the hard way that there is no file backup sytem in the world that can compete with a hard copy. Worst case scenario, I'll take a picture of it with whatever the capture medium of the day is.

I did a post back on Oct 18 2005 - Digital File Safety and got chewed up by some of the "techno digital guys"on this site pretty bad.I work in the semiconductor industry and have seen this coming for years.The technology sector could care less about this issue because their only concern is for us to turn over all our hardware every 3 - 5 years.Inkjet prints fall into this category too because nobody can prove their true duration over time.A film hardcopy remains the safest bet considering the "burn your bridges" mindset of the digital information industry.Film guys may still have the last laugh after this all shakes out.

"Film guys may still have the last laugh after this all shakes out."

 

OK, guys, how about this: A device for transferring a digital image....to film! Something like a very high optical quality projector coupled to a camera, or maybe just a film back, that would preserve the digital image on the film of your choice with negligible loss. Remember, you heard it from me first (and please don't tell me there's already one of these puppies out there?)

Stranger yet, wouldn't it be funnty to save those ones and zeros on something we know is archival - film. A sheet of 8x10 film can hold gigabytes of image data and will last longer than your average data media. Certainly we as humans will be able to deal with it when the power goes out after the next wars. We don't live in cyberspace.

 

 

Doug Grosjean wrote:

Come to think of it, Greenfield Village has some Edison recordings from the earliest days of the record player. Wouldn't it be funny if we moved from CDs to a way of saving digital 1 and 0 on vinyl records stored in environmentally controlled places? Thomas Edison would be proud....

John Castronovo:

8x10 film for archival storage is an interesting idea. Did you mean a photo of 1 and 0, or a photo of the original document..? If the origanal document, at that point we're talking about bringing back microfiche on a big scale, correct?

Apart from archival qualities of digital image, storage media, devices that read the media etc etc .... I think in the future we will have to deal with patented file formats. Just like microsoft struck a deal with Novell saying "we wont sue novell customers... if you bend over .. " Corps might sign deals like this that will make it illegal for you to have a file in certain format on certain operating system or media. What then? will you bend over? pay up ?

"Stranger yet, wouldn't it be funnty to save those ones and zeros on something we know is archival - film."

 

It wouldn't even have to be ones and zeros, just dark, pixel-shaped spots alternating with clear spots. Kind of like....IBM punch cards.

Peter and Jeff both miss the point.

 

Yes, as long as there is a migration path provided for everything needing special software to be read, digital files *can* be kept *safer* than analogue media, as one can make any number of identical copies and store them independently.

 

*But*, (as both actually describe), it takes *constant, active maintenance* to keep digital files. As soon as nobody looks after them, their storage media, the necessary software and the hardware to run the software on, a lot of them will be unrecoverable in pretty short time. Negatives or printed documents survive neglect much better. (But are of course susceptible to catastrophic events.)

 

BTW, Peter and Jeff, I hope both of you are not only making backups but are also checking the integrity of your original files from time to time? We already had one thread here from someone who found out that the corruption which had taken out a lot of his originals had been spread faithfully to all his backup media...

 

Andreas

Wikipedia is like a box of chocolates... As of right now (about 11:10 AM Eastern, November 27, 2006) the Wikipedia article on the Mavica offers this tidbit:

"The brand is most associated with digital cameras that record on floppy disks, but the name was first used for a line of analog still video cameras announced in 1981, and there were later digital models that recorded onto CDs."

 

I recall that my high school, in the early 1990s, had an old Mavica which used the miniature floppy diskettes (smaller than 3.5") referenced above. The pictures could only be displayed by connecting the camera to a TV. They could be "archived" by recording to a VHS cassette, in addition to storage on the original disks.