It's lengthy, but important - perhaps the most important piece on your photography that the NY Times has published in awhile. I encourage you to read it and tell us what you think.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/style/digital-photo-storage-purge.html
This has come up before. In terms of the Flickr mass-deletion of photos, it has happened several times with various companies in the form of digital music files. Much like digital photo storage it only lasts as long as the company - or their promises - does.
The article also touches on the relative permanence or impermanence of various forms of storage. This has also come up many times on RFF in the past. One I particularly remember was just after 9/11, when it was discovered that an important vault of negatives from the JFK era had been stored in one of the towers which was destroyed in the attack. Gone forever. So much for the permanence of single-points-of-failure.
I recently made the decision to pay for a year of Flickr Pro while I decide what to do with my 58,000+ photos I have on that service. Although each and every one of them is also on my local storage and not in peril of permanent deletion, I still don't relish the task of dealing with this, so I paid their blood money and pushed the decision off for a year. I have not yet decided what to do about it. Flickr was a reasonable platform for me when I put the effort into tagging my photos, and I sold more than a couple that way. Even got a magazine cover once.
EDIT: I recently looked at a photo trove posted on Flickr by a gentleman who served in WWII - and amazing archive. However, he was in his 90s by the time he stopped posting and he is no longer online - I presume he has gone to muster with his troops in the next plane of existence. He's not around to save his photos. When Flickr whacks them, that history, his work and contribution to the future, is gone forever. That's sad, but it was probably predictable.
What I have in my physical possession is about 1TB of digital photos and digitized film images. I have several plastic tubs of sleeved negatives and slides and some prints going back to 1979 or so.
The film is not organized, and they are not all digitized. If my house burns down, they're gone. I'm sure I've lost some here or there over the years as well.
My digital photos are largely in good shape, going back to my first foray into digital photography in 1998. I do have a rigorous storage regimen, which includes tagging, storage by date, and backups. I've lost hard drives, but I haven't lost photos. At least not so far.
Over time, I hope to get more of my film archives digitized and stored. I'll keep the film as well, of course, in case scanning capabilities get better and I want to do it again later on.
However, I also need to accept the reality of the situation. The overwhelming majority of my photos are interesting to no one . They are not historically important. They don't matter much to anyone but me. I'm not saying they are naff - I'm reasonably proficient - I'm saying they are irrelevant. When I am gone, no one but perhaps my wife will care, and she will only care about the ones important to both of us, maybe not so much my infrared experiments with dilapidated houses in rural North Carolina so much. It's ephemera of the highest order.
So we strive to avoid the inevitable, and I accept that it's a battle I will eventually lose and who cares? One of my more fatalistic observations about maintaining camera gear is that it isn't going to be 'passed on' and treasured by the next generation as one of grandpa's old cameras. It will be on eBay, or more likely in a thrift store or a garbage dumpster within weeks of my passing. It just doesn't matter.
It matters only while I'm alive to care, and I do care, so it matters - for now.
