bwcolor
Veteran
If the Library of Congress is having problems with digital archives, what does this bode for your digital image files?
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=114&sid=2065163
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=114&sid=2065163
Digital Archives
- Thread starter bwcolor
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PatrickONeill
Well-known
if you want to archive your digital images, the only sure choice is a nice archival quality photo print. digital storage is not archival by nature, its just a successive of backups and transfers of digital files that will eventually corrupt.
Pickett Wilson
Veteran
As folks on the Gulf Coast discovered in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and Ike, film and prints aren't "archival" either. Nothing certain in this world. 🙂
Steve_F
Well-known
Interesting. On the BBC News when 'Toy Story 3' was released there were a couple of people (I forget who) from Hollywood and they said that the characters had to be re-created as they couldn't read the format of the originals. Oops.
Steve.
Steve.
Pirate
Guitar playing Fotografer
Just curious, but, If you fill up a hard drive with your digitized photo back-ups, then unplug it and put it away somewhere, is there anything short of a natural disaster to deteriorate the files?
nikon_sam
Shooter of Film...
Yup...you can lose anything...just ask Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart...
So just keep shooting...
40oz
...
Yes and no. Didgital storage on a magnetic media, such as a hard drive, is subject to deterioration from a variety of sources. Not to mention the very real possibility that there will be no compatible machine to plug it back into down the road. My current Dell desktop has a single IDE drive connector, for the DVD drive. And I've seen machines that have only SATA connectors. At least with a USB enclosure you're probably future-safe for a little bit longer, but it's a bigger gamble than saving the same data on CD-ROM.
AFAIK, the safest method of digital storage is to output the images onto film and use a professional storage service such as Iron Mountain or some film-specific storage service. No lie.
John Rountree
Nothing is what I want
Pirate, consider this. I am sure that somewhere along the way you have purchased a music CD that played just fine. Then, one day you went to play it and it wouldn't play. Or, maybe a song would skip and keep repeating a segment over and over. It is the same with ANY digital file. Digital files can and will corrupt for no apparent reason. It is so random and unpredictable (but certain) that everything must be constantly backed up over and over again. There is no way to tell what files will corrupt or when it will happen. It really is the fatal achilles heel for digital files of any kind; word, music, photography, et al. BTW, there are also plenty of instances where an external hard drive won't restart if it has not been used or powered up for a long time.
Pirate
Guitar playing Fotografer
And so I have more reasons to stick with film 😀
L. M. Tu
Established
I was asking a friend who works for National Geographic how the magazine was archiving its digital images. He said that it was being done on film. This was more than five years ago - around the time of the tsunami in SE Asia - but I don't know if they're doing it differently now.
Pirate
Guitar playing Fotografer
I think I'm missing something here... How do you archive digital images onto Film? I don't get this.
finguanzo
Well-known
Im guessing he meant tape storage maybe? which is film, magnetic tapes..
PatrickONeill
Well-known
mag tapes last only 15 years.
you can output digital files onto photo film. a nice fat 70mm dupe will be more than enough for high mp cameras.
Gumby
Veteran
Pirate
Guitar playing Fotografer
Neat. So, how can I get some of my digital images put onto film?
antiquark
Derek Ross
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Freakscene
Obscure member
Sorry, but frankly this means that your Library of Congress archivists are either under resourced, or complete idiots. I some how doubt the latter, considering that some of the most savvy archivists I have ever met or worked with were trained there. The story is also unclear on a number of matters.
A digital recording can be reproduced without quality loss innumerable times. If they are adequately stored they will not fade. Irrespective of how you store film, or any other analogue media, it degrades. My contacts there indicate that National Geographic no longer store digital file using analogue media but do what anyone sane would do; make several copies on archival media and store them in several locations.
Magnetic digital media can corrupt easily, but most serious archives also store their material on optical and solid state media.
It is unclear from the article WHY or HOW the Duke Ellington, early sports broadcasts etc were lost, or if indeed they are gone. If they were digitally stored and were lost, the only answer is under resourcing or negligence, but they don't make it clear if they are actually gone or if they are just no longer available to the public.
The best answer to archive anything is to make digital copies on several archival media, store them properly and continue to back them up, including onto new media over time. Any analogue media, however stable, degrades over time. Ones and zeroes do not degrade. If you write them on paper, they degrade at the rate that the paper degrades, but if you copy them to new paper they will last forever. Even lost or corrupted digital data can be fixed if someone knows what the file sounded like or the image looked like; and even without that, someone can make a decent guess. Try doing that with analogue media.
I back my film photos up digitally.
Marty
A digital recording can be reproduced without quality loss innumerable times. If they are adequately stored they will not fade. Irrespective of how you store film, or any other analogue media, it degrades. My contacts there indicate that National Geographic no longer store digital file using analogue media but do what anyone sane would do; make several copies on archival media and store them in several locations.
Magnetic digital media can corrupt easily, but most serious archives also store their material on optical and solid state media.
It is unclear from the article WHY or HOW the Duke Ellington, early sports broadcasts etc were lost, or if indeed they are gone. If they were digitally stored and were lost, the only answer is under resourcing or negligence, but they don't make it clear if they are actually gone or if they are just no longer available to the public.
The best answer to archive anything is to make digital copies on several archival media, store them properly and continue to back them up, including onto new media over time. Any analogue media, however stable, degrades over time. Ones and zeroes do not degrade. If you write them on paper, they degrade at the rate that the paper degrades, but if you copy them to new paper they will last forever. Even lost or corrupted digital data can be fixed if someone knows what the file sounded like or the image looked like; and even without that, someone can make a decent guess. Try doing that with analogue media.
I back my film photos up digitally.
Marty
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Matus
Well-known
I use a RAID1 storage. I got the best hard drives I could, but eventually one of them will fail (per definition) be it 3 or 7 years. The I will exchange the bad one (if the same type can be still bought) or change both of them. That is as far as I go as an amateur photographer.
Just one caveat - loading data to a hard drive a storing it does not meant that it will work when you plug it to a computer 10 years later. Yes - it did not rotate or move the heads, but the special grease that allows those elements to move will eventually evaporate. So per definition hard drives are not really archival storage.
Data storage from a different point of view:
I am working for ALICE experiment at CERN which is taking data with 1.25 GByte per second what sums up to more than 1 PByte per year. The data as taken (so called raw data) are stored locally on tapes or disks and redistributed to two more places for back up which is stored on hard drives (in a RAID systems). Any subsequent data storage is on hard drives for accessibility reasons (tapes are SLOW).
Just one caveat - loading data to a hard drive a storing it does not meant that it will work when you plug it to a computer 10 years later. Yes - it did not rotate or move the heads, but the special grease that allows those elements to move will eventually evaporate. So per definition hard drives are not really archival storage.
Data storage from a different point of view:
I am working for ALICE experiment at CERN which is taking data with 1.25 GByte per second what sums up to more than 1 PByte per year. The data as taken (so called raw data) are stored locally on tapes or disks and redistributed to two more places for back up which is stored on hard drives (in a RAID systems). Any subsequent data storage is on hard drives for accessibility reasons (tapes are SLOW).
PKR
Veteran
Most digital photo programs (photoshop) will output to formats that print to light sensitive material. The Fujimoto printer is a digital to analog silver based printer. The printing paper is type C. There are film printers that perform the same task.
bigeye
Well-known
All points are true above. The problem is that the average photographer does not know, nor want to bother with backing up digital properly. Film archival is a very mature, well- known process that is relatively simple. Digital is not. To me an online archival service ("bank") would be best - they can manage the process correctly.
See YouTube for Chase Jarvis' digital processes to see the complexity and sophistication of one small well run operation. This is just to secure "working" (much less archival) files secure. This is the level of understanding required to do it yourself in digital.
A flickr, picasa, or kodak type service will be needed to keep the files over long periods. I don't believe that they have the file integrity and restoration processes in place that are necessary. They don't make those claims in their "Terms", so an additional service level is required for true archiving.
The fact is that you can put your negs in a shoebox and be reasonably certain that they will maintain themselves and be printable in 60 years (like my Dad's K64s). While technically possible today, it is not as simple, easy or inexpensive to archive digital to film's level of assurance. It hasn't been worked out universally, yet.
- Charlie
See YouTube for Chase Jarvis' digital processes to see the complexity and sophistication of one small well run operation. This is just to secure "working" (much less archival) files secure. This is the level of understanding required to do it yourself in digital.
A flickr, picasa, or kodak type service will be needed to keep the files over long periods. I don't believe that they have the file integrity and restoration processes in place that are necessary. They don't make those claims in their "Terms", so an additional service level is required for true archiving.
The fact is that you can put your negs in a shoebox and be reasonably certain that they will maintain themselves and be printable in 60 years (like my Dad's K64s). While technically possible today, it is not as simple, easy or inexpensive to archive digital to film's level of assurance. It hasn't been worked out universally, yet.
- Charlie
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