long term archival storage solution

[saulzelan]

<p>Hello photo.net community:<br>

Does anyone have an opinion on the best long term archival storage medium for archiving treasured digital images? I've heard that burned DVDs can have a (scary) short shelf life at times and I hesitate to trust my long term archiving to USB hard drives given that I've had some fail in the past and then poof there goes your image gone forever! </p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Multiple external drives, kept in multiple physical locations. Periodically copy them over to fresh devices, and rotate them. Drives just keep getting bigger and cheaper, and it's ever easier to copy them, as the links/controllers get faster. Don't trust any single device or its single backup, and don't trust one single <em>location</em>.</p>

[peter_e]

<p>Read my recent post on CD-R's.</p>

[marc_rochkind]

Yes, as Matt says, but also keep your most important images in the cloud. Choose a major player, such as Amazon

S3, which is what I use. (Use JungleDisk.)

 

And pay attention to where your non-cloud backups are stored. Your home or office AND the cross-town bank vault

will all go in an earthquake, nuclear meltdown, flood, etc.

[bill_tuthill]

Not sure what reading Peter E's thread is supposed to accomplish. Here it is:

 

http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00YHqM

 

I bought a stack of Taiyo-Yuden CDRs, which are supposed to last the longest in dark storage, but have been writing to DVD+R also. Probably there is less difference between different brands of DVD than between different types of CDR. However I have seen no real longevity numbers for DVD. Certainly you want to store data on DVD+R not DVD-R for better error recovery. I won't repeat the other good advice on this thread and others.

[saulzelan]

<p>Thanks so much to everyone for your input. I especially like the idea of the amazon server as an additional backup, paying someone else with the technical know-how to help preserve my data integrity seems like a very cost-efficient solution, and saves me a lot of potential headache! I was also thinking of using a compact flash card to archive the MOST favorite images in their final photoshopped format. This would allow me for example to store several hundred single file versions on one 16 gb card, which at say 100$ per card per year (my estimated need for top drawer images...) seems like a reasonable additional investment. Anyone know anything about the longevity of a compact flash card? </p>

[Greg M]

<p>Any image I do not want to ever lose, I save to my Smugmug web page. Other than buying new drives and copying old folders over I don't worry too much about doing a lot extra to save the RAW files. So far (knock on wood) I've not lost a file I wanted to keep due to a crashed hard drive, but after a few months I rarely, if ever, go back to them. So long as I have a JPEG on file in my Smugmug site and I keep paying that annual fee, I'm set. The unlimited storage space they offer makes using them as my off-site storage facility as easy decision.</p>

<p>I can't remember the last time I burned a DVD or CD.</p>

[phule]

<p>The only thing that you should be considering "long term" is your methodology: multiple, redundant backups. Hard drives are the most cost effective solution right now to move and store large amounts of data, but it will not be the last solution. Who knows what we'll be storing on in 10 or 20 years?</p>

 

[Matt Laur]

<blockquote>

<p>It is questionable whether anyone will be able to read CDs, DVDs or even hard drives 50 years from now</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Nobody who is being their own responsible archivist is expecting to put a hard drive in a box and never give it another thought for 50 years. Some occasional modest chores are part of maintaining a large library of images. We have never seen a mass data storage device show up and become useful in such a way that the generation preceding it becomes unreadable/uncopyable any sooner than many years. USB drives are going to be readable for a long, long time (in terms of their data interface) into the existance of whatever widgets come along next. We'll all have many years to plan the Saturday afternoon it will take to copy from one format device to the next and to freshen up off-site backups. Years.</p>

[bill_tuthill]

Oh oh! Library of Congress says: "Most CD products earned a high probability of prolonged lifetime relative to their DVD counterparts."

 

http://www.loc.gov/preserv/rt/projects/cd-r_dvd-r_rw_longevity.html

[kellyway]

Maybe consider blueray for raw file archive? 25 gig/disc...

[jamie_robertson2]

<p>If you don't care what will happen to your work after your death then by all means backup using multiple digital devices in different locations and on backup servers. As long as you maintain those backups it is extremely unlikely you will ever lose a thing.</p>

<p>However, if you think your work has value AFTER your death, then either shoot film or make high quality archiveable prints from your digital work.</p>

<p>Why? Because EVERY method of digital backup completely relies upon frequent maintenance by humans. For example, say a DVD has a lifespan of 15 years, a memory card 10 years and a HDD 20 years (pure guesses!) then 20 years after you are dead ALL your work will be gone forever unless someone cares enough to maintain AND PAY for those backups.</p>

<p>Naturally this is all assuming that technology does not advance to create more reliable backup methods in the future.</p>

<p>Here's an example... you visit a home that has laid empty for years after en elderly person died. You then come across a computer from the early to mid '80s that had laid around in the loft - would you be absolutely confident that all the data on the HDD (or floppy disks) would be retrievable and useable? More than likely it would be trashed. The floppy disks would almost certainly be toast. If (in the same loft) you also come across a big box of photographs (prints, negatives and slides) from the early '80s you can bet your a$$ they'll almost certainly be in decent order.</p>

<p>This is what frightens me about digital. As long as I'm breathing I'll be taking care of my work but when I'm gone it will most likely die shortly after me. How many remarkable film photographs exist in the world that have been discovered over the years? Think of all the old images that are stumbled across each year. I have a friend who recently found a big box of negatives lying in the street in Paris waiting to be taken with the rubbish. He picked them up and they contained gems from Hollywood. Photographs taken on the set showing famous actors in their youth... one was Christian Bale and he hasn't even scanned the rest of them yet. How many of your non-photographer friends have lost hundreds of family photos due to a computer crash? Plenty of mine have I can tell you!</p>

[David_Cavan]

<p>I love the film vs digital security arguments - all the same stuff gets trotted out every time. Where's Steve Smith? He and I normally get into it about now. All of these choices only matter if you are prepared, as Matt says, to practice good archival behaviour. But there is on thing that should be clear to everyone after this week and the horrors that so many are facing in Japan - if you are reliant on one copy of anything (negative, print, card, CD, DVD, removeable hard-drive...) ALL of your stuff can be gone in a moment, and assuming it still matters to you when everything else is so "gone" then you need to decide how to plan for that. As I said in another thread about this a while back, I believe that most of the prints and negatives shot in the last hundred years are already gone - because someone didn't care, didn't have a plan, or didn't have an heir who was going to keep up the archive. And the same situation exists now for most digital photos. So, however you plan to archive your stuff, think it through, and consider the worst-case scenario.</p>

<p>My approach is that we have all of my stuff scanned (both my father's, and mine); and I practice the "at least three copies, geographically disbursed" strategy. I still don't use the cloud, although I think it is becoming a valid solution for at least that percentage of shots you really want to have safely archived somewhere. But I would not rely solely on that - I'm a belt and suspenders guy when it comes to this subject.</p>

[David_Cavan]

<p>Should some file format commonly used today be superseded by some magic new format I will be the first in line with a new app to convert all of your images to the new format and charge you $39.99 for the privilege. Unfortunately "first in line" will mean there are a bunch right behind me with better, faster tools to do the same thing. If you want your stuff to be readable in twenty years, in the three disbursed geographical locations there will be plenty of solutions for that. If you don't care, or don't manage it the outcome will be no better than my aunt who passed away recently, and we discovered after the fact she had thrown away every picture and negative she ever took or collected. How sad it that?</p>

[surfidaho]

<strong>"Grasping at things can only yield one of two results: <br /> Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear. <br /> It is only a matter of which occurs first." </strong><br /> <em>Goenka</em>

 

<em><br /></em>

<em><br /></em>

Obviously this guy never picked up a camera. I use double hard drives linked together with RAID, plus additional hard drives which are powered down in a secure location.

 

 

Consider me grasping.

 

 

Later,

 

Paulsky

[henryp]

<p>No one knows more about archival matters than <a href="http://www.wilhelm-research.com/">wilhelm-research.com</a>.</p>

<p>Henry Posner<br /><strong>B&H Photo-Video</strong></p>

[JDMvW]

<blockquote>

<p>We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Go thou and do likewise with your images.</p>

<p>As an archaeologist I can tell you that the most unlikely of materials will survive under the right, consistent circumstances. The most archival things you can make (graven images on stable stone) can be blown apart by natural or human agency ( see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan">Buddhas of Bamiyan</a> )<br>

All is vanity, sayeth the preacher.<br>

Both film and paper are spectacularly non-archival materials by archaeological standards, much less CDs and DVDs or magnetic signals on a thin layer of iron or whatever.</p>