BBC: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

[CameraQuest]

BBC article: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever​

if the link does not work, search for "Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever"

"If you used a digital camera in the early 2000s, there's a good chance whole chapters of your life have been erased.
A generation of photos has vanished on broken hard drives and defunct websites."

Probably true for many, but probably not so much for RFF members

are your negatives starting to look a better record of your life than digital memories ?

 

[Cascadilla]

When I bought my first DSLR in 2004 I was vaguely aware of this and bought an external hard drive and burned duplicate CDs of every job that I shot. I still have the CDs (the gold ones that were rated for 300 years) and eventually backed everything I had kept onto M discs that were rated at 1000 years. I also still have working CD,DVD and BluRay burner/players so I can still access the files. But for the last few years I have gone with multiple hard drives since I am getting close to retiring from commercial work and so far that has been sufficient. When I see that a hard drive is getting to 2/3-3/4 capacity and is more than 3 years old I migrate the files to a new drive before anything really terrible happens. I strongly doubt that anyone will be that concerned about anything I have in 50 years and I am certain that there will be new file formats, new connecting cables/protocols and generally incompatible devices unless someone actively migrates these files to new devices on a regular basis. I don't envy anybody in charge of maintaining a digital collection over the long term unless they have healthy budgets and competent people to make that happen.

 

[boojum]

When I bought my first DSLR in 2004 I was vaguely aware of this and bought an external hard drive and burned duplicate CDs of every job that I shot. I still have the CDs (the gold ones that were rated for 300 years) and eventually backed everything I had kept onto M discs that were rated at 1000 years. I also still have working CD,DVD and BluRay burner/players so I can still access the files. But for the last few years I have gone with multiple hard drives since I am getting close to retiring from commercial work and so far that has been sufficient. When I see that a hard drive is getting to 2/3-3/4 capacity and is more than 3 years old I migrate the files to a new drive before anything really terrible happens. I strongly doubt that anyone will be that concerned about anything I have in 50 years and I am certain that there will be new file formats, new connecting cables/protocols and generally incompatible devices unless someone actively migrates these files to new devices on a regular basis. I don't envy anybody in charge of maintaining a digital collection over the long term unless they have healthy budgets and competent people to make that happen.

I am old school HD thinking. It is not a question of if it will fail but when. Copying HD's as they age is a great idea. And save the old ones, "just in case."

 

[rick oleson]

BBC article: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever​

if the link does not work, search for "Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever"

"If you used a digital camera in the early 2000s, there's a good chance whole chapters of your life have been erased.
A generation of photos has vanished on broken hard drives and defunct websites."

Probably true for many, but probably not so much for RFF members

are your negatives starting to look a better record of your life than digital memories ?

I lost thousands of photos in 2008 to a crash of the hard drive that I had saved them on. The entire year of 2007 disappeared. I managed to recover some from 2008 that I had copied in multiple places. I back everything up on a separate drive now, even though most of them are random junk.

But what about storage formats and interfaces becoming obsolete? CD drives are gone from all but antique computers like mine, the USB system keeps evolving, changing, adding new connectors and obsoleting others, connections are going wireless. What will someone do with my portable hard drive in the future when there is nothing to plug it into any more?

 

[Alpsman]

That's THE reason I shoot in black and white.
I have 70-year-old negatives from my ancestors, and if necessary, I can hold them up to daylight and use a magnifying glass to see who's in them.

I can view some even older prints without a magnifying glass, though I do need glasses.

 

[aw614]

Photobucket did a number on a bunch of car forums killing a bunch of diy guide photos.

I know i've lost a few photos from hard drives crashing, etc. it sucks.

 

[Godfrey]

I have lost far more of the photos I made on film than I have of any photos made with a digital camera.

G

 

[Richard G]

I still have the early digitally Nikon Coolpix 4500 photos, but not all. Some corrupted. Concurrently I’ve kept up film each year, minimum frequency, slide film for long term survival of medium, and colour, photographs of the family. A few gems worth keeping: prints.

 

[Zuiko-logist]

I have photos backed up to thumb drives, hard drives, CDs and DVDs - trying to keep track of it all is a chore and I should consolidate.

 

[rogxwhit]

To me the idea of preserving a personal archive is anal behaviour and is the product of an urge to control that is inevitably futile, since we are a long way from immortal in our worldly existence & one day will die, as will all our progeny. Also, it involves more and more 'stuff' - as if we didn't have enough already, all of which has to be manufactured, transported, powered, etc.

 

[raydm6]

I don't think anyone would be interested in my stuff after I go so I don't put much effort into preserving etc. other than backing up my files. If they go, they go...

Unlike Brett Weston who intentionally destroyed his negatives. 🙂

On his 80th birthday, Brett Weston fed sixty years worth of his negatives into the large fireplace in his home on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Some of the negatives didn’t burn immediately. So Weston doused them with kerosene. Yes, he was something of a pyro. Over the course of that evening in 1991, flames consumed the raw material of one of the greatest photographic legacies in the history of the medium.

A Natural Eye

The Photography of Brett Weston

www.counterpunch.org

 

[mtnbkr]

I've got all of my images going back to pre-2000.

Though I was mostly film until 2005 or so. However, we scanned film images that we wanted to share, so I have some of my earlier analog files in a digital format. The unscanned analog stuff consists of prints in albums and negatives in a binder.

All of my digital work is backed up in 3 copies. There's the copy on the main drive of my PC, a copy on a 2nd drive in the same PC, and a 3rd copy on my server in the basement. Those backups are automated and verified periodically. I have a 4th copy of some of my stuff on a portable drive that gets left at a relative's house in another town (or state in one case). I rotate those drives periodically.

Which reminds me, my mom is in town, so I should run a portable backup and send it home with her.

Chris

 

[moggi1964]

I have mine. Been backing up to a portable drive for years and also I have a cloud based backup just in case the house burns down. I also back them all up once a year to a portable drive I keep in a fireproof safe.

My negatives are going to be screwed if there's a fire though.

 

[Cascadilla]

I am old school HD thinking. It is not a question of if it will fail but when. Copying HD's as they age is a great idea. And save the old ones, "just in case."

Agreed that it isn't if but when. I had a RAID drive fail under warranty and drove it to the company that made it only to find out that they couldn't recover an Apple Time Machine drive without the computer that it was attached to, something they hadn't bothered to tell me before I brought it to them. So they essentially wiped it and installed new drives but I moved on to different drives from another company and by following my procedure of migrating often and multiple drives I so far still have the files that I care about. Anybody want a 10 year old FireWire 800/USB 3 RAID drive that hasn't been used since that debacle?

 

[Freakscene]

I have lost or had some negatives irreparably damaged. I have every digital photo I’ve ever taken.

 

[mrtoml]

I have lost or had some negatives irreparably damaged. I have every digital photo I’ve ever taken.

Same here.

 

[Oren Grad]

are your negatives starting to look a better record of your life than digital memories ?

If the concern is preservation within your own lifetime, either is fine - you just need to be committed to periodic migration of your digital files to new storage media.

If the concern is about pictures being accessible once you are gone, neither is much good. It's likely that no one will either know about or have the patience to worry about active maintenance of your digital files, but by the same token, hardly anybody will have any idea what to do with negatives.

If you want your pictures to be accessible after you are gone, you need to pick the ones that you think matter, make prints of them using reasonably durable materials, and store them in some reasonably orderly way. That's no guarantee they will be saved, but it at least allows for the possibility of someone coming across your shoebox / album / portfolio case and being able to see what you wanted them to see.

Sure, transparencies are arguably an alternative, color stability aside. But hardly any new pictures are being recorded that way, and most transparencies are in 35mm or small 120 roll film size, forcing people to find a magnifier or to fuss in more elaborate ways to be able to view them clearly. (If you're making large format transparencies, more power to you! 🙂)

 

[rick oleson]

If the concern is preservation within your own lifetime, either is fine - you just need to be committed to periodic migration of your digital files to new storage media.

If the concern is about pictures being accessible once you are gone, neither is much good. It's likely that no one will either know about or have the patience to worry about active maintenance of your digital files, but by the same token, hardly anybody will have any idea what to do with negatives.

If you want your pictures to be accessible after you are gone, you need to pick the ones that you think matter, make prints of them using reasonably durable materials, and store them in some reasonably orderly way. That's no guarantee they will be saved, but it at least allows for the possibility of someone coming across your shoebox / album / portfolio case and being able to see what you wanted them to see.

Sure, transparencies are arguably an alternative, color stability aside. But hardly any new pictures are being recorded that way, and most transparencies are in 35mm or small 120 roll film size, forcing people to find a magnifier or to fuss in more elaborate ways to be able to view them clearly. (If you're making large format transparencies, more power to you! 🙂)

But I can pick up a hundred year old negative and SEE what's on it, as I did with several old Brownie negatives of the Graf Zeppelin flying over downtown Chicago in 1933, apparently taken by my father or grandparents. With digital media, unless you can read the file, you don't even know that it's an image file at all, or for that matter whether the ancient USB stick even has data on it. There is a difference there.

 

[Oren Grad]

With digital media, unless you can read the file, you don't even know that it's an image file at all, or for that matter whether the ancient USB stick even has data on it.

If you want people to know that your digital media contain photographs, label them.

 

[boojum]

Both analog and digital images can be lost. The difference is in how they are lost. The beauty of digital is that it can me copied endlessly insuring a freedom from loss that analog cannot. My two cents.