Forced obsolescence

Socke said:
And I can show negs to you which are brittle and discolored after some 20 years, I had a hard time scanning and restoring them some 5 years ago.

Those negs have been stored in "archival" sleeves in normal room temperature and humidity but the Kodak lab may have screwed up processing Kodak film.

From digital media I can make copies which are inistiguishable from the original, I can copy to new media and I can have several copies.

And another benefit, no picture gets lost in the mail!

And a big BUT!

I earn a living with document management systems, we use digital storage since 1993. The oldest digital archive we support is the local electricity companies asset management.

So I not only know how to maintain a digital archive, I have access to the appropriate media and recorders.
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Redundancy is more important than being able to copy onto newer media.

For instance, I shoot film and store the negs and prints.

I also scan the negs into RAW data files which are separately stored on external HD's and also DVD's.

And DC Sang's point is well-taken. You may be very diligent about updating your files to new media. But many people are not. One could very well wind up in a situation where files are on obsolete media or are in unsupported older formats.

Finally, digital media does degrade over time - so I believe it is incorrect to say you can make copies that are indistiguishable from the originals. That would depend on the age of the original media. How it was stored etc.
 
>>That's why one shouldn't just throw out those old(er) but still working pc's and laptops. Hang it in your home network and you still have easy access to it and the peripherals.<<

That's a good idea. I only recently set up a home network. Wireless. But I imagine it would be pretty easy to include my old 488/133 as a printer-server with the old scanner attached.
 
jody said:
Ive had 95, 98, Me and now XP, all have more problems than the first mac. If I buy again if will be a mac.
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I ran a technical publishing business using Mac and OS 7.n - took years off my life - dreadfully flawed OS., it came good with OS8 but I'd need a coach and horses to drag me back to Apple. I've still got 2 stored in the garage.
 
I recently discovered that in order to read all the CDs I made one my old PC with Windows ME (Ugh!) on my new HP dual core media PC that I will have to install my old Roxio CD creator on it. As is it says there's no data and no empty space on the CDs.

In a related vein, I just found some Kodak Gold 100 negs of rare wildflowers that I took 20 years ago, and they look like new. At that time my office in the Pentagon was using 5.5 inch floppy discs in the PCs and I don't think there was enough room on one disc to hold one 48 bit image scanned at 4000 dpi. The negs should be useable for at least another 20 years as long as I continue to store them properly.
 
I can't help people who don't read the manual, if they buy the cheapest media and store them in bright sunlight nobody can help.

Most packages have icons showing what not to do with the media, so even those who can't read should be able to find out how to handle storage media.
OTOH, most computer users know how to burn pirated videos and music to CDs, they even know how to copy those CDs so they can give copies to their friends.
I'm pretty sure they can figure out how to copy a CD with pictures.


There is no magic or secret technologie behind this, just handle the media with the care you take in handling negatives and on a rainy evening every other couple of years copy to newer media. Blueray and HD-DVD drives for computers will be downward compatible to DVD and CD, so no problem there in the next 10 years.

Five years ago I bought my first DVD-RW drive, it burnt DVDs at 2x speed. Now I copy those DVDs at 8x speed and what took a couple of hours to master and burn is now copied in 20 minutes while I write in RFF.


I for one have proof that 1950 B/W negatives, carefully processed and washed, are fine today, and I have proof that 1980 C-41 negatives, probably not carfully processed and washed, aren't.

JPEG, Tiff, DNG, even most RAW formats are well documented, the way files are stored on CDs and DVDs is an ISO norm and more than well documented, any programmer worth the name can write a decoder for image files stored in a ISO9660 filesystem. If you can't find a drive to read them, the nearest university with a high powered microscope can help.

And NASA managed to loose most of their moon landing footage without the need of digital storage 🙂
The badly digitized and broadcasted footage is still there, the analog originals are gone.
 
Socke makes a few good points, and it all comes back down to the same few basic principles. Use open standards (not the *******ized versions from MS) and you're data will be safer. Nothing much will help you if your only copy of your pictures is under 6 ft of water in New Orleans - that's film or digi.

Both forms of media have major weaknesses.
FILM = Single Point Of Failure, lose/damage the neg/slide, and it's the end.
DIGITAL = Multiple Points of Failure, but require some work to keep up to date.
 
And let' not forget the most important point of failure in any storage system, be it digital or a filing cabinet, the user!

That's why I use write once media, I can not accidentialy delete a file on a DVD but I have done so more than once on harddrives.
 
Ya ya..
and I can never accidentally step on a hard drive but have stepped onto CD's or DVD's that people have just left "lying around" because they thought they were indestructible.

There's arguments for AND against EVERY type of backup solution.

I'm merely stating that the general populace usually don't take such things into account when backing up their data. I certainly do and obviously Socke does too.... but walk into your local supermarket and ask the cashier if they back up their data. And then ask them what they use. And then ask them how long they think it will last......... you'd be surprised at how much educating you may have to do before they grasp the fact that nothing is "forever" 😀

Dave
 
I happen to have two PCs, so all my digital data is on two hard drives. One is at home, the other on the road with me. There is also a third set on Cd, but that's just to make the inevitable restore of whichever drive crashes first a tad easier. At some point I may get a small RAID system, but I can't quite afford that yet.

(And yeah, they both could go at the same time...)
 
In regards to the original post. I still run DOS on a P-III laptop.

I can run WordPerfect, Quake, Doom, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Secret Agent. Any DOS application can be run. I could even run linux/windows.


Point is, I have a need for 'obsolete' software on an 'obsolete' platform. So I have a dedicated system for the specific purpose of running the ancient applications.


That's the same as having a darkroom - it's dedicated to an antique way of doing things.

That's the same as when 'planned obsolescence' reaches its goal for the Digital-M or other, people will have a bootable partition on their supercomputer (that's the size of a thumbnail) to run solely for the purpose of using the camera's features.


It's only obsolete to a developer. It can be alive and kicking as long as a user has need.
 
We all should be putting a order through at B&H for some Kodachrome 64. This thread is depressing me, just like those who thought Y2K was going to end everything. I just laugh. So for archival we need to have K64. 🙂 Can the owners of RRF, get us a bulk discount on K64? 🙂


Cheers

Mark
Quito, EC
 
With some effort, I can find new equipment that will play 78 rpm gramophone records, a standard that existed from about 1900 to about 1955. They require specialized equipment, but there is enough of a market that this equipment is still available.

At this point, with millions of end-users, I think jpegs and tiffs are pretty robust storage standards. Digital images are ultimately a bunch of I's and O's. If there are a lot of jpeg files around in 100 or 200 years, then I think converters and adapters will also exist.
 
Socke said:
I can't help people who don't read the manual, if they buy the cheapest media and store them in bright sunlight nobody can help.

Most packages have icons showing what not to do with the media, so even those who can't read should be able to find out how to handle storage media.
OTOH, most computer users know how to burn pirated videos and music to CDs, they even know how to copy those CDs so they can give copies to their friends.
I'm pretty sure they can figure out how to copy a CD with pictures.


There is no magic or secret technologie behind this, just handle the media with the care you take in handling negatives and on a rainy evening every other couple of years copy to newer media. Blueray and HD-DVD drives for computers will be downward compatible to DVD and CD, so no problem there in the next 10 years.

Five years ago I bought my first DVD-RW drive, it burnt DVDs at 2x speed. Now I copy those DVDs at 8x speed and what took a couple of hours to master and burn is now copied in 20 minutes while I write in RFF.


I for one have proof that 1950 B/W negatives, carefully processed and washed, are fine today, and I have proof that 1980 C-41 negatives, probably not carfully processed and washed, aren't.

JPEG, Tiff, DNG, even most RAW formats are well documented, the way files are stored on CDs and DVDs is an ISO norm and more than well documented, any programmer worth the name can write a decoder for image files stored in a ISO9660 filesystem. If you can't find a drive to read them, the nearest university with a high powered microscope can help.

And NASA managed to loose most of their moon landing footage without the need of digital storage 🙂
The badly digitized and broadcasted footage is still there, the analog originals are gone.
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You are a very smart person and have used your capabilities to arrive at very firmly held conclusions. One would find it futile to expect you to change your mind by pointing out alternative arguments.

Suffice to say, it would be unwise to assume that digital data can be made "timeless" even with regular updating for new media etc.

It is one thing to be smart. It is another to be wise.
 
Kin Lau said:
Socke makes a few good points, and it all comes back down to the same few basic principles. Use open standards (not the *******ized versions from MS) and you're data will be safer. Nothing much will help you if your only copy of your pictures is under 6 ft of water in New Orleans - that's film or digi.

Both forms of media have major weaknesses.
FILM = Single Point Of Failure, lose/damage the neg/slide, and it's the end.
DIGITAL = Multiple Points of Failure, but require some work to keep up to date.
Click to expand...
Making a back-of-the-envelope estimate, I would say that roughly 10% of my clients (yes, independent of computer platform), actually bother to back up any of their data, including images from their digital cameras. This means a SPoF for them as well–the images were wiped from the memory card, the images were not copied to either a secondary HD or optical media, even the cheap n' risky stuff I'm always railing against. It sometimes seems like I have to put a gun to people's heads to convince them that a backup system is a Good Thing; a few people who have lost hundreds of images (and paid a fortune for DriveSavers or similar services to pull them back from the abyss) seem to have gotten religion about this, but, like health care, prevention seems to sound unsexy until one gets deathly ill.


- Barrett
 
amateriat said:
Making a back-of-the-envelope estimate, I would say that roughly 10% of my clients (yes, independent of computer platform), actually bother to back up any of their data, including images from their digital cameras. This means a SPoF for them as well–the images were wiped from the memory card, the images were not copied to either a secondary HD or optical media, even the cheap n' risky stuff I'm always railing against. It sometimes seems like I have to put a gun to people's heads to convince them that a backup system is a Good Thing; a few people who have lost hundreds of images (and paid a fortune for DriveSavers or similar services to pull them back from the abyss) seem to have gotten religion about this, but, like health care, prevention seems to sound unsexy until one gets deathly ill.
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I've had more than 1 client start from zero with their _accounting_ data due to a lack of proper backups.

Carelessness abounds in all facets of life and business.

But once you get beyond doing _nothing_, then it's down to the basic principles I mentioned.

I have both film & digital memories that I want to keep. Understanding the basic principles help me to make sure each get the care required.
 
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