Digital Dark Age: a thought-provoking article

Good article but a bit of over reaching. He says when was the last time you read a Word perfect doc. Well I have Word perfect docs from the 80's that Microsoft Word can read with ease. When new software comes out it is usually doomed to failure if does not read (and write) to a whole host of legacy applications. From my experience that is true with digital photos as well. but a far more serious problem he brings up is data erasure. But then house fires do the same thing to negs, etc.
 
kshapero said:
Good article but a bit of over reaching. He says when was the last time you read a Word perfect doc. Well I have Word perfect docs from the 80's that Microsoft Word can read with ease. When new software comes out it is usually doomed to failure if does not read (and write) to a whole host of legacy applications. From my experience that is true with digital photos as well. but a far more serious problem he brings up is data erasure. But then house fires do the same thing to negs, etc.
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It is the mediam, can you still find a 8' floppy drive these days? even ebay does not sell it. When the mediam gone bad, regardless which program can read it, the base is gone forever. I burned some Cd for my digital filnes, only one year, I can read some of the CDs, they gone forever.
 
As someone pointed out here a while ago: If you want to preserve it, you will. If you don't, you won't. Makes no difference whether its made from bits or a piece of paper. These articles are just absurd.

/T
And in case you need an 8" floppy drive, you can get there here. And that's probably not even the best place.
 
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Tuolumne said:
As someone pointed out here a while ago: If you want to preserve it, you will. If you don't, you won't. Makes no difference whether its made from bits or a piece of paper. These articles are just absurd.

/T
And in case you need an 8" floppy drive, you can get there here. And that's probably not even the best place.
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Do you really NASA was not really willing to save data from a past mission?
vulnerability of data is something important (at least to me). No backup system is perfect but some are more prone than others to accidents.
Personally I shoot B&W and K14 film exclusively for that reason.
 
TIF will be around a hell of a lot longer than word perfect. And we check the integrity of our storage all the time. When new mediums come out, we transfer the data. If JPG and TIF are about to vanish from the earth we'll convert to NLS or HUS or SHIDJH or whatever.

The problem will be inadequately stored data being physically lost, not compatibility. And the first is preventable. You just have to give a crap.
 
Still flogging this dead horse I see. My question is this. Have you made plans as to what will happen to your photos when you kick the bucket? I'm betting a large percentage, whether on disk, CD, DVD or boxes of slides will end up in a landfill somewhere.

But then I'm the realist everyone calls a pessimist...
 
The digital age moves the focus (pardon the pun) from protecting the original by defensive measures to protecting the image through replication.

If your house were to be flooded, catch on fire, etc (G-d forbid), with photos and slides and negatives, there was not much you could have done to protect those images - not without some very serious and sometimes expensive effort, like making dupes, etc. Not many people do or did that (yes, I know YOU did, but most of us didn't).

We've had this discussion before - I recall one person who argued that he had a shoebox of 30-year-old Kodachrome slides that looked fresh as a daisy, so that was clearly the superior method. I am glad his house has suffered no catastrophes, but I'll bet there are some folks in Florida and New Orleans who feel differently about their shoebox that floated away, slides and all.

Now, the onus is on YOU to keep track of your digital photos, to make copies, to change file formats if necessary (seldom needed as far as I know, but it could happen) and change digital storage media as old ones become obsolete. Yes, CD's fade. Yes, no one makes 8 inch floppies anymore. That's YOUR responsibility to keep up with.

All the examples the author of the linked article used are failures of the primary caretakers of the data. If they wanted it, it was their responsibility to protect it. That's not a fault of the digital age, that's a failure to plan.

Same thing can be said for all the movies that turned to goo in the movie cans over the years before people started desperately trying to save them by copying them to newer formats on safer film bases. Not the fault of the media - it was what it was - the best they had at that time. The fault was with the caretakers of those reels.

Banks and other financial institutions have lost lots of value in recent weeks - but they have lost no data. That's because they are on the hook in a very real way for preserving and protecting that data from destruction. So they take it very seriously, they have plans and procedures in place to replicate, backup, and test restoral methods - and it works.

If you treasure your photos - digital or film - you are the one responsible for taking care of them. That includes not letting technology pass you by, checking your CD's to make sure they're readable, getting an offsite storage plan working, making redundant copies, and so on. Fail to do that - blame yourself.
 
As Kevin pointed out, we are not going back. You can, of course, continue shooting film until it is gone. But, after that you'll simply have to give up photography because you deny digital is archival. How long with Kodachrome last in a shoebox? 100? 200 years? Who knows. Then it will be gone...unless someone scans it and maintains a digital archive.
 
G*dd*mn, people, can't we just celebrate the technology we have available to us rather than just b*tch all the time?

I just finished editing a wedding I shot for a friend, all on film. Photoshop allowed me to get the images to look exactly the way I wanted. I then uploaded the folder of images via FTP transfer to my friend's website in England in about eight minutes. So now I still have my negatives, should I ever want to rescan them, a copy of the corrected files on my computer and burned to DVD, plus duplicates across the pond should my house burn down. I have the film look, a level of color retouching unimaginable a generation ago, and digital duplicates sent around the world in a flash. What the heck is there to complain about? 😕
 
While of course it's up to the person to maintain what they wish to maintain, the level of effort to maintain digital is higher than analog (this is assuming the house does not burn down). I have negatives dating back to high school that I have maintained with zero effort by putting them in a binder. Yes, they generally don't have a backup, but I've also put no effort whatsoever into just keeping them around.

Backing up and replicating is easier with digital but there's also an effort involved with just keeping the original set viable.

I'm no Luddite, either: I have three digital cameras and three film cameras. For work stuff I shoot digital because it's easier to know I have it right, but for most personal stuff it's film.
 
Most of the silent films shot at the dawn of motion picture films (about 75%) are lost.

Film was highly flammable, and once the commercial life of the movie was over, worthless. Preserving it costed money, so nobody did it. If storing digital is cheaper than storing film, it will live longer.
 
My take on this piece was that there are costs that were not recognized when these data were created. So changing the medium of storage for obsolete or soon to be obsolete documents of any kind now requires expenditures that weren't budgeted or anticipated.

I think everyone felt this stuff was forever once it was "digital". Now movement in storage technology changes rapidly making the process more exhaustive than simply racking books and maintaining proper atmosphere for them for 20 or 100 years. Anyone want to try and see what you have to spend to dub a VHS movie to DVD. I imagine that the Library of Congress must be shuddering at the size of the backlog and it’s costs for ‘updating’. I think that's what the piece is about, costs.
 
kevin m said:
G*dd*mn, people, can't we just celebrate the technology we have available to us rather than just b*tch all the time?

I just finished editing a wedding I shot for a friend, all on film. Photoshop allowed me to get the images to look exactly the way I wanted. I then uploaded the folder of images via FTP transfer to my friend's website in England in about eight minutes. So now I still have my negatives, should I ever want to rescan them, a copy of the corrected files on my computer and burned to DVD, plus duplicates across the pond should my house burn down. I have the film look, a level of color retouching unimaginable a generation ago, and digital duplicates sent around the world in a flash. What the heck is there to complain about? 😕
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I think your posts of late make you one of my favorite posters in this forum.
 
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