climbing_vine
Well-known
antiquark said:What is the definition of "archival" here anyways? Everyone's throwing around the word, but it appears that everyone thinks it means something different.
Perhaps there are degrees of archival storage. On the upper end, you have silver halide negs being stored in humitity and temperature controlled facilities. In the middle of the scale, you have prints stored in shoeboxes and photo albums. At the low end of the scale, you have photos stored in .pict format on 5.25 floppy disks.
Maybe shoeboxes and photo albums are "practically archival," because they're known to last for 50+ years. If we're comparing shoeboxes to floppy disks, I'll put my money with the shoeboxes.🙂
Maybe a floppy, yes... but that's specious. Nobody uses a floppy now. It was a makeshift technology during the infancy of an industry. I might as well claim that "analog" isn't "archival" based on the fading of salt paper prints. Utterly inane and childish, frankly.
The majority of those "shoeboxes", the large majority, are already lost or unsalvageable, and more are following every hour.
And as someone already said, this idea that there are file formats (namely .pict) that can no longer be read is an utter fiction. Mythology. I'm not even a pro and I have at least three programs on my laptop at the moment that can read a .pict file. 😛
I am at pains to stress that I'm not interested in digital except for the occasional usefulness of immediacy. I've owned dozens of cameras and my standby continues to be a self-serviced FED-2. It doesn't matter. Reality is what it is.