What are the newest methods of archiving digital images?

Prints indeed. Encourage people to make high-quality prints of their favorite pictures. Not just for 20 years from now, but also for the present. People in general seem to take more pictures than ever but also make fewer prints (if any!) than ever. At least this is true for the people around me: almost nobody makes any prints at all.

Instead, pictures are often quickly forgotten and easily lost when people leave/delete their accounts on social networks or yesterday's hot blogging platform goes bankrupt or a login/email account is compromised or the laptop without a backup dies and there's no computer ninja nearby. Prints, prints..
 
OK, I was joking, up above, I have, however, been involved with long term digital storage in the past and retain an interest.

The problem with all magnetic and optical systems, so far, is that they rely on media that can be mutated but which, once mutated, do not subsequently change with age. However, all the media so far used does change with age, as a consequence of their mutability, hence "bit rot".

Some researchers are looking at something not too far from my Platinum sheet. One contender is a version of IBM's atomic force microscopy technology, that really would drill bit patterns into a highly stable metal medium, Platinum or Gold being obvious choices. Other ideas involve using another IBM invention: electron-beam proximity printing, which was originally developed for chip fabrication but could be adapted for write once data storage.

However, as has been said above by others, very few organisations want to retain data for much more than a decade, so the market focus is on MTFs in the five to fifteen year range. Only museums and national libraries think in terms of centuries and they tend to have very restricted resources, so are not capable of forming a market that can justify R&D on the same scale as the current magnetic and optical storage markets. As a consequence, the research that is being done is generally academic, supported by companies for social reasons. I'm sure something will come of it but it may take a while.

I'd just like to comment that tape is no more reliable than any other magnetic medium, especially at very high densities. I have personal experience of this at a number of very large sites, where tape restoration has been, shall we say, "problematic" on more than one occasion.
 
archiving prints is a very narrow minded view of what a digital photograph actually is and what it can be in the future. Digital photograph files do not and should not exist without a computer /software interface. The technology we will have in the future to manipulate saved data is a huge advantage to digital archiving. A digital file is a living negative, it is a real waste to dismiss how different and much more powerful it is than an emulsion negative or print

Also, For any colour work I say that digital is the only universally archival medium. Even for B&W, I have seen my own work from 15 years ago done in University supplied darkrooms degrade.

As for the cost digital archiving? To say it is more expensive is false. I can have multiple backups of tens of thousands of images stored in multiple locations for a few hundred dollars. As time goes on solid drives get cheaper and larger, so as I replace my backups over time it gets incrementally cheaper, and more secure. How much would it cost to make multiple archival prints of ten thousand images, and then have space to store them at multiple locations in archival conditions (temp/humidity controlled)? I can't fathom the monetary cost, let alone the time needed.
 
Chris you're right when you say color film has not proven itself B/W film has and like I said the big Hollywood Studios "save their film on color separated B/W films.

Digital long time preservation is very expensive in fact Digital is the most cost intensive material to be preserved in archives. Soldi drives aren't archival either btw. Ask the library of congress or your national archives about the cost for digital long time preservation.
 
I am reminded of an old blues song by this thread....

I am reminded of an old blues song by this thread....

"I've got the tears in my ears, lying on my back, crying my eyes out over you...Blues!"

As far as I am concerned, now that digital has arrived on the scene, time for photography should be divided into thirds. Determine how many hours in a week you are going to DO photography, either as a hobby or as a profession.

For instance if you are going to do 90 hours a week... fairly normal as a self employed profession, you should divide that number in thirds, which comes to 30 hours a week. Now devote those groups of hours to :

1) Capturing images, including travel time, gear prep, and time spent shooting and CHIMPING.
2) 30 hours uploading sorting and deleting, pixel peeping, and post processing. Add ten unaccounted for hours for dealing with RAW.
3) 30 hours a week spent weeping at night about your data security dilemma, OR spend those 30 hours a week, every week on designing and stabilizing a "Back Up system" that works by your design. (no peeking at the guy next door as NOBODY has a system you will appreciate, or not break if you use it).

Now, you could, as some do, totally disregard any intrinsic or monetary value of your images, and just say Frack It. Sleep those hours soundly, again, as some (too many) do.

Now consider that the very real solution, that you walked away from some time ago, is to shoot film and properly archive negatives, transparencies and archival quality prints.

Digital offers no easy, or easily manageable solutions, considering continued evolution of medias. WHEN IS THE LAST TIME YOU RESEARCHED CD ROT OR DVD ROT!!!!! on Google or Yahoo. And forget the "CLOUD". Don't even go there... literally!!

When is the last time you tried to telephone a web site that did not appear at your beckon on a Monday morning. Just try to find an owner, or phone number that is still in service, if found at all.

There is talk (urban rumor???) of professional photographers who lost images from more than one dedicated photography storage-backup sites that failed on the internet. Some of them trusted the internet so much the site they used was their ONLY source for their images. C'mon now,... do any of us really know at least one photographer who would fall into that trap....yes!! I do!

Nope, the problem is entirely yours. Nobody else really gives a s__t as long as you pay the monthly storage dues.

Ask me what I do.... Nothing!, I sleep those 30 hours. Never made a dime on any of my images, and all the people I know who will inherit my images are Amish. Life is just so much simpler for them. One of my Amish cousins was de-amished for bringing home an i-phone one day.

Dedicate the third of your photography time to redundant drives, on site/off site storage, no internet hosting storage, migrate your data as new media arrives, For God's Sake get them OFF optical media Now!, but spend the time. The money is extra.

Or just take two of those little pills that allow you sleep in spite of all the "Tears In Your Ears".
 
So you see... there you go....

So you see... there you go....

tom.w.bn said:
After reading "90 hours" I knew that the rest of the text must be a joke too and stopped.
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No time for a good joke. I hate to imagine how secure (insecure) your images are??? Life is dull without laughter. I went through 3 wives and 4 long term live in situations to make that determination.
 
kuzano said:
And YET, we have no digital archives from 3000 BC. It turns out the Amish have been right all along!!
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An ancient photo of Jesus Christ has been found, according to a supermarket tabloid. Of course, it wasn't digital back then.

neighbor11.jpg
 
celluloidprop said:
Unless there's a fire, flood, tornado, hurricane or other catastrophe.
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Exactly.

Here's a tip: I can fit 3 2TB external drives in my safety deposit box, the cost of which is $30 per year (and is tax deductible). .250" Steel lock box, inside a nest of multiple layers of steel, all inside a vault with a 1000lb steel door and 24" thick concrete walls.

Where can you store thousands of prints and negatives that compares?
 
Another riff to this conversation is that today's digital storage devices may not be readable a century from now. How many floppy discs, hard and soft, have gone by the wayside with no popular means to read them? Today's hard drive may not be accessible to computers of the tomorrow, other than to digital history geeks. Whoever runs across photo gems by a modern-day Vivian Maier stored on a 500GB hard drive may simply look at it ... then toss it in the e-dump heap.
 
I like Vivian Meier's work, bought the book, etc. - but truthfully, it's not as if the loss of her work would have been a grave blow to art and humanity.

The greater digital danger is memories - no scrapbooks with old prints of your grandparents. Easily remedied by printing (which is no more difficult today than 50 years ago), but few do.
 
Just put them into as many online image libraries as you can with as much exif data as possible. They'll probably survive to the end of the world then or a nuclear holocaust whichever comes first.
 
135format said:
Just put them into as many online image libraries as you can with as much exif data as possible. They'll probably survive to the end of the world then or a nuclear holocaust whichever comes first.
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Yes. Flickr is actually contained in a bunker 17 miles under the pentagon. Extremely safe.
 
well.. I suppose as the roaches become self aware, they'll need entertainment.

Just remember; every time you upload to Flickr ask yourself if the cockroaches will like it. They might have high standards
 
Dana B. said:
Another riff to this conversation is that today's digital storage devices may not be readable a century from now. How many floppy discs, hard and soft, have gone by the wayside with no popular means to read them? Today's hard drive may not be accessible to computers of the tomorrow, other than to digital history geeks. Whoever runs across photo gems by a modern-day Vivian Maier stored on a 500GB hard drive may simply look at it ... then toss it in the e-dump heap.
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I agree. We have already seen a generation change in harddrive interface. IDE support is all but gone, and will disappear soon enough. Sata will give way to newer technology just like IDE did for SATA. But harddrives don't last long anyway.. it definitely will not out live its interface for sure.
 
Take the vinyl storage medium one step further and use nickel. There are a few record production companies that will do this for you (but I know that with one particular company, you'll have to pay up front.)
After you have your nickel LPs cut, you can find a geologically stable part of the world to store them. Might want to have a few sites. Boring a hole into monolithic granite would probably be safe enough.

Something along these lines was almost done by one spiritual leader years ago. It's said that the nickel LPs of his words are still at the production facility because the organization that ordered them never paid off the bill in full.

I wish I could find a reliable source of 1" magnetic tape and had access to the old processor I used to work with in the Navy.

Realistically, what I have now are a few external drives, a few 2.5" IDE drives for the expansion bay on my laptop and my desktop which has a 250GB working drive and a 4TB RAID5. Currently everything is spread out in different locations, only because I'm in the middle of moving. When I fill up a single TB external, I mail it to New Mexico and have it put in a safe deposit box at my credit union.

Phil Forrest
 
I know the contractor (owner) who is digitizing the Library of Congress. As I remember the final solution for digital storage was 78 RPM Vinyl. So digital media (ones and zeros) is stored to Vinyl media. The thinking was, that with the on going trend of constantly out dated storage devices, they wanted a media and record - play (read-write) device that could easily be reproduced (From engineering drawings) that was simple to make - and a media that had proven storage longevity, without (with little?) data loss. Properly stored Vinyl records hold their data well if stored and played (read) properly.
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Did your acquaintance sell you some of that Brooklyn bridge? I understand it's a great investment: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/techIn.html
 
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