Stability/ Longevity of Digital Media

[Foto-factotum]

What is the best method to to ensure quality and longevity of scaned negatives, slides and digital copies of digital pic's? CD, DVD and/or extenal hard drive? Suggestions of best place to store the media?

Any ideas of brands that are better that others?


Will appreciate advice.

 

[Buze]

Digital media is very unstable; Cd-R and DVD-Rs have /at best/ 5 years lifetime, and a lot less for any practical purposes. You need to "refresh" (ie re-burn) your DVDs/Cds every year or so if you want to keep them.
Keep several copies, on different media brands, in different places. Cool and dry works as well for optical media as for film/prints.

The only media that is "archival" (tentatively) is the "gold" CDs that were produced by Kodak. they were the first, and they still are the best; Kodak discontinued them 5+ years ago.

 

[IGMeanwell]

CDs and DVDs have alot longer lifetime than 5 years ... 5 years if we are talking a CD used more than once a month consistently

Of course since burnable CDs are a relatively new medium its hard to be definitive...

There are tons of digital media stored by the Smithsonian ... as Buze says keep them in a safe dry place

but for all intents and purposes... CF cards, or SD cards are incredibly stable when just holding media and not being used. One reason manufactures are trying to increase their storage capacity is due to their stability vs, CDs, DVDs or Harddrives.

http://www.nmnh.si.edu/cris/techrpts/imagopts/section1.html

another article http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa13.htm

 

[ZorkiKat]

I would favour the harddrives least. They have moving parts which can get knocked out. Besides, anything stored in these can be altered accidentally- trying viewing them and rotating the pic- the pic will then be (often) saved as such. The pic's qualities are already altered by doing so.

Those on CDs on the other hand, their longevity questions aside, are quite 'indelible'. The files remain original, and you can only work on copies of the original files. This is important in image editing. The way one image is edited today may not be favoured tomorrow, and the indelible file on the cd is always around to turn back to.

Jay

 

[Bryce]

I can attest to disc rot as a fact. I've got more than a couple of no longer readable CD-rom discs... The deal is, as I've gathered, that disks burned in your computer's drive are not stable because the laser is only altering a colored dye which can fade easily. This does not apply to commercially made CD's or DVD's because they are "pressed" like a phonograph... Much more permanent.
Multiple hard drives seem like the best bet; the likelihood of more than one failing at the same time is very small.
Anyone else have solutions?

 

[jaapv]

Solutions? Simply use gold standard disks - duplicate and store in different locations and copy every five to ten years. Any conservator of a photographic museum will testify to the struggle to conserve historical film and prints. This is a whole lot easier.

Btw, my oldest digital storage is Kodak photodisks of about fifteen years old. Not a thing wrong with them, apart from the grotty quality of the scans. But I still have the original slides-I could easily scan them again-if I had time and energy.

 

[rxmd]

trying viewing them and rotating the pic- the pic will then be (often) saved as such. The pic's qualities are already altered by doing so.

JPEGs can be rotated lossless if their dimensions are divisible by 16.

Anyway, for archiving burnable media I would use DVD-RAM media. Specifications on them are relatively strict, and if used with a filesystem such as UDF, they have a built-in defect management due to the hard sectoring on the media.

Otherwise, the good old magneto-optical disk is still hard to beat, they should last longer than most of us and stay readable. Of course, that assumes that you can still get a drive in 50 years, but since a lot of archival data is archived on MOs and the medium is an ISO standard, you can expect that there will be someone around who can read them. Might cost money, though.

Properly stored negatives outlast most digital media, so this is the one field where film is without any doubt still superior, assuming you don't store your negatives in cardboard boxes in a damp cellar.

On the other hand, this has been discussed all over the web for the last ten years or so, so in a way we're flogging a dead horse here.

Philipp

 

[Buze]

I must say I'm a digital boy (started programming computers at 12, haven't stopped since) and always have used digital until last year, and the film archival was a /major/ point in my decision to "switch" to film.
I poped a quality DVD-R I burned maybe 2 months ago in the drive yesterday, and it's unreadable....! Now that archival for you...

I just don't understand how the market can continue selling this kind of technology. They sell mostly large black holes where the poor user dutifuly burn his life on, trusting all the "indestructibility" spin about optical media.

If you want to find (a lot) more about archival of prints, films other supports, you can download the mega pdf file of the book "The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures"

It's free ! http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html

 

[GeneW]

Now that they've dropped so much in price, I like multiple external drives for multiple copies, including rotating off-site storage. Lots of redundancy is a good principle.

Gene

 

[Pherdinand]

The most stable would be to print the digital files on sheets of papaer.
But it would take quite some space up. All those zeroes and ones...

 

[Ronald M]

I burned a few CD`s and kept them in my car changer for 4 years, -20 to +150 deg F and 10% to 100% humidity. The vehicle got daily use so it was heated and cooled twice daily or more. They played fine when I sold the car.

The abuse was intentional. These were not CD-Rewritable

Two back ups on DVD are recommended. Store one off property to protect from fire and theft. An external hard drive is a plus.

 

[Buze]

Ronald, music CDs and data CDs are not the same, despite being using the same support. The Music CD can "recover" plenty of errors even if the CD is damaged. The encoding used was designed to be like that.

The Data CD encoding has no provision for that. If you get the "wrong" bad track the whole thing is unreadable.