What are the newest methods of archiving digital images?

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L David Tomei

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There are many concerns over whether our digital images will be lost in the future through file corruption, incompatible formats, etc. The standard advice is to have external multiple backups of images and to not rely on hard drives in the computer or external drives attached to the computer.
It would seem that perhaps there should be a mechanism to transfer high resolution images back to silver-based film emulsions to ensure that the images will still exist in 20 or 30 years. As far as I have seen, there is far more concern over this matter of digital image archiving among photographers than among those in the computer industry. I have piles of unreadable digital tapes and cd's that can suffer physical corruption of the discs themselves and it all isn't very reassuring.
What is the newest thought on methods of archiving that will reasonably ensure that our digital images will have the life expectancy of a 19th century negative?

EDIT: Sorry for the typo on the title. My fingers are too big for these damn keypads.
 
You could employ an army of very tiny people to hammer the bit patterns into sheets of platinum. That should last for a few centuries, though you'll need a spare moon or two for storage...
 
Actually, technology for transfer of high resolution digital images to film exists including high speed scanning laser, all seemingly impractical though. The 2006 report from JISC "Digital Images Archiving Study" http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/preservation/imagesarchivingstudy.pdf) is a starting point but it's 6 years old. For many of us, not being Getty or a big company, archiving for decades is still worrisome.
 
Back to the future: Aside from Film LTO Tapes are currently the best long time storage medium for digital images. Five servers in five different earthquake zones is another good storage possibility but you have to migrate your Data at least every five years to a new hard drive.

Digital Storage is a 100X times more expensive in the long run than using and storing film. That's a sad fact, most harddrives are not meant for long term storage five years max.
You have to save your files in Tif format uncompressed, jpeg is an absolutely useless file format for long term storage. The advantage of Tif files is that they can still be opened after a bit failure, jpegs can't. CDs RW, DVD, Blue Rays are worth than useless as storage medium. A homemade CD starts to deteriorate after less than a year.

THe Big Hollywood Studios store their movies on color separated B/W films event those shot with Digital cameras. Germany saves its important digital data not only images on Microfilms stored in old mines.

Very expensive and not feasible for private use.

Dominik
 
Keeping multiple copies in different locations and copying them to new technologies as they appear IS the proper and absolutely functional way of keeping digital archives. Put simply, it works...IF...you're diligent about it. Its a lot of work, especially for someone like me with thousands of images, many of them bringing in income...so the time and work is worth it. Even if you're not doing it professionally, the photos are important to you, so you should try to keep them safe.
 
Chris, you sound like a sharp, young, committed professional photographer based on your comments here and those I have followed for a while now. However, remember that there is a big world out there of ordinary people, serious amateur photographers, but also your average person with everyday photos of family and their world around them. The market for most cameras in the past and today. Just like those who took so many of our now more appreciated photographs of past ears and generations, people take millions of digital images of there life. They are not nor will they likely be capable of following the stringent methods that you outline here. Photography has played a vastly more important role in our cultures and to that is what I refer. In 20 years the "shoebox" of family photos, records of ordinary life, very well may not exist.
 
The main problem of digital long term preservation is that the companies producing HDD, CD, DVD and other digital storage medias make their money with short term storage solutions and are absolutely not interested in long time preservation because it would reduce their profit. Understandable but still sad. I wouldn't trust those nelson ink test either. Film has proven that it can survive a 100 years by surviving. The new medias haven't proven themselves quiet the contrary in fact.

Dominik
 
DominikDUK said:
The main problem of digital long term preservation is that the companies producing HDD, CD, DVD and other digital storage medias make their money with short term storage solutions and are absolutely not interested in long time preservation because it would reduce their profit. Understandable but still sad. I wouldn't trust those nelson ink test either. Film has proven that it can survive a 100 years by surviving. The new medias haven't proven themselves quiet the contrary in fact.

Dominik
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Color films have NOT proven themselves; most color films from the 1950s-1970s have faded badly by now. Kodachrome, now discontinued lasted much longer, but only if kept in the dark; they rapidly deteriorated if projected!
 
DominikDUK said:
The main problem of digital long term preservation is that the companies producing HDD, CD, DVD and other digital storage medias make their money with short term storage solutions and are absolutely not interested in long time preservation because it would reduce their profit. Understandable but still sad. I wouldn't trust those nelson ink test either. Film has proven that it can survive a 100 years by surviving. The new medias haven't proven themselves quiet the contrary in fact.
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I don't think that's entirely true, maybe for magnetic or optical disks but even there there are some exceptions (MO disks, for example, seem to hold up pretty well, admittedly they were introduced only in the 1980s but the chemistry and physics look good for them).

Tape technology on the other hand is pretty well understood, has been used for archival data storage since the 1950s. As Chris rightly points out, this is longer than the lifespan of some color films. There is also a substantial long-term investment in it. If you want long-term storage, that makes it pretty feasible, in particular in combination with making copies of your old media every 10-15 years or so.
 
DominikDUK said:
The main problem of digital long term preservation is that the companies producing HDD, CD, DVD and other digital storage medias make their money with short term storage solutions and are absolutely not interested in long time preservation because it would reduce their profit.
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That's quite unfair. The simple matter is that hard drive technology, and digital image technology, has so far outstripped all other data storage technologies out there. It's not because they have ulterior motives, it's just the pressures of the tech market encouraged a lot of hard drive improvements, and didn't encourage significant improvement elsewhere. Used to be that servers could be backed up to tape, and that tape was archival and easily stored. But not anymore: the only reasonable storage medium for a hard drive is... another hard drive. Scale that up a few orders of magnitude and you have the cloud.

When you have a terabyte or more of images to back up, you don't have a ton of options. Two or three external drives, and keep at least one off-premises. At home, I have a 2TB drive in my computer, a Drobo-FS with 5 2TB drives in it with one-disk redundancy that backs me up all the time, and I use a couple small portable 1TB drives to back images up to every week (sometimes every other week, I do get lazy) and I keep those at work.
 
I store on multiple hard drives and try to have a reasonably fresh copy in more than one location. If something beats that system, I think I have bigger things to worry about than my photographs.

I also print.
 
For a number of good reasons, emulsion based storage on any material (film or paper e.g.) is no longer an option. It isn't likely that any electronic medium that does not permit random access such as tape is no longer viable given the fact that several terabytes of image files is not unusual. As hteasley said, "the only reasonable storage medium for a hard drive is... another hard drive" and it would seem he is right for now.

In a market driven world, I would think that archiving technology would necessarily have to be accessible not just to large organizations and commercial enterprises, but to the average person at home. I am curious as to what that technology may be for photography and the "new shoebox".
 
PKR said:
Having worked with a few Intel folks who built the Google servers - the "Cloud" is the last place I would store anything sensitive or valuable. People who work at Google don't trust Google (Google Cloud is one of the big providers). Anyone's cloud servers can fail. Worst case - Carrington Event. Most likely - were sorry, your files were lost, we hope this doesen't inconvience you.
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Right: note that I don't include cloud storage as one of my personal solutions.But the point is, there's no good backup medium for hard drives except more hard drives.
 
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