How long will a photo last in storage?

[derek_thornton1]

Just recently I broke out a hard drive that had some old photos on it.  The photo was from 2007 on the BRP. It looked pretty good so I clicked on the RAW file to start the PP. It was a little crooked so I did what you do to straighten and it straightend just fine but left faint verticle lines throughout the entire photo. I hit undo and the lines disappeared and it went back to being crooked.  I have never had this problem editing any other photo so I assume the photo is no longer any good. 

So, just how long will a photo last on a hard drive that is kept in storage? This photo has not been on this HD since 2007.  It was first put on a 500GB HD. Later it was moved to a 1TB drive and again later moved to a 2TB drive. It is on 2 other HD's and I have not checked those drives yet. But, the picture on the HD in question is no longer workable.

Also, the photo in question was taken with a Nikon D200. It seems like all of my old photos taken with the D200 have not aged well. I do not know if that has anything to do with it. Obviously I need to fix this problem for future photos so any pointers will be appreciated.

PS- I keep all of my photos on 3.5 internal HD's which I hook up to computer via a single or dual bay drive. The Hard drives are stored in Orico padded cases. They pretty much stay at temps between 68-74.

[digitaldog]

How long will photo's last on an HD? Or for that matter, any data?  Impossible to answer! In time, all drives can fail. Which is why you need to have multiple copies (backups) to reduce this  possibility.

Time for a group of HD's and cloud storage; belt and suspenders approach. 

[John Seaman]

You seem to be saying that when you opened a D200 RAW file with an image editor and tried to straighten it, the faint lines appeared. And that you suspect that some kind of corruption of the file is responsible. Could there be other reasons? Perhaps try the same operation on a copy of the file from one of the other HD's, or on another D200 file - what do you mean by your D200 files have not aged well, do they all exhibit the same behaviour?

[royfisher]

3 hours ago, derek_thornton1 said:

It was a little crooked so I did what you do to straighten and it straightend just fine but left faint verticle lines throughout the entire photo.

That's a software problem.  It's doing a mediocre job of calculating the rotated pixels.  It's possible that when exporting the image (to a JPEG, for example), the software might do more accurate (slower) calculations and the image would look as expected.  There's a lot of better software available these days, though.

If the file were bad, there would be areas of noise, the file just wouldn't load at all, or the software would present an error message or maybe lock up.

I still have good files on 5.25" floppy disks from the mid-1980s!  (Not recommending this, though.)

[Glenn McCreery]

If you store data on a solid state drive (SDD) rather than an HD, then according to https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/estimate-remaining-lifespan-ssd/   "An SSD has a limited number of possible writes before the drive breaks down into read-only mode. On average, a modern SSD will survive until you've written about 700TB of data over its lifetime."  Other internet sites give an estimate of SSD average lifetimes from five to ten years. I have just started using internal SSDs for some data storage and back them up using external HDs.

[paddler4]

+1 to what the Dog wrote. Actually, perhaps more like +1,000. You should always have multiple copies of files that matter. Full stop. Ideally, one should be in a different location. 

I currently have 3 of all files that matter to me now: my internal drive, and external drive as a mirror, and a cloud backup. 

With the decreasing cost of storage, I haven't yet had to decide how to deal with true archives of files I don't need anymore. I suspect I'll drop down to two copies in different locations, perhaps using different types of media.

That aside, I really doubt that what you describe is degradation of the storage medium. I wouldn't expect a regular pattern of the sort you describe. I think a software issue is far more likely. If you had multiple copies, you could determine this in a minute or two: just open a second copy of the image from a different storage medium. If it's OK, then the problem may lie with the first medium. If it's not OK, then the problem is not storage.

Edited November 22, 2022 by paddler4