A crazy curiosity

[Traut]

I collect and wear vintage watches. I often think of the moments they've timed. It started when I was waiting for my second son to be born. Did someone wear the same watch during a birth, a first date or as I usually do - is it time for a drink?

 

[oscroft]

Well if you insist on using junk, the chances that they will survive is about zero

Absolutely, yes, but that's my point - my uncle's big box of photos probably would have been printed using junk, because his mum wasn't a photography enthusiast and didn't have much money. Had digital photography been around at the time, her photos would have probably been lost.

I would expect about the same out of consumer inkjet prints as consumer color prints from a lab. These will both fade it you keep them in the sun in a matter of months, but in the dark box will last almost forever

My wife has a lot of consumer lab prints that are only 10 years old or so that are already badly fading - they haven't been carefully secreted in total darkness, but then they haven't been hanging on a wall in the sun either - just stored and looked at the way people generally store and look at photos (the way my uncle's photos would have been stored and looked at). So if only those photos that have been carefully stored in the dark and only minimally exposed to light will survive, again many of my uncle's box of photos would have been lost.

Your loose HD, maybe, maybe not, it all depends on what measures are taken over the next few years, but I would assume that the HD is not going to be readable at a reasonable price in 50 years

I agree - I've been in the computer business for nearly 30 years and by 10 years old a high proportion of HDs have failed. But even if an old HD is readable, it doesn't really solve the problem - contrast "Oh look, a box of 50 year old photos - let's sit down and have a look at them" with "Oh look, a 50 year old HD that we can't read any more - let's find a data recovery service and get them to try it on the off chance there might be some photos on it".

But who knows, maybe someone will build a system to read non-moving disks and recover data from any system that existed in the past

I hope so, but that's only solving part of the problem (and, as I say, you have to know there's something worth recovering in order to even think about it - serendipitous discoveries of boxes of old photos don't work like that). The other part of the problem is that even if the hardware can be accessed, data formats become obsolete - not only file formats like jpg, but disk sector formats like HFS, NTFS, etc. Even NASA have lots of old data that they can't read any more because, even though the disks it is on are fine, the data format is obsolete and they no longer have any software that can make sense of it.

But I'm not all doom and gloom The problem is well known now, and perhaps the mere fact that millions of people shoot digitally will give commercial impetus to finding a long term solution (a commercial impetus that could never have happened with NASA). The answer, to me, is possibly a "cloud" one (I hesitate the call it the Internet or the Web because in 50 years time who knows what will have replaced it and what it will be called?) - online photo storage will automatically update the hardware devices (HDs, backup discs, tapes) as time progresses (which will also update low-level - eg disk sector - data formats). All they then need is a longer term file format update service - "Save with us, check an option, and we'll update your file formats as and when necessary".

But all that does rely on people using such a service, takes active input from whoever is running the service, and requires that they don't go bust. So for the time being I'm sticking with boxes of negatives, because I *know* the format will be readable in 50 years.