Preserving photos for ever

zaax

Looks like I have a hard drive crash, a drive which had all my photos on won't wake-up, luckly its all backed-up.

With hard drives only lasting about 10 years and thumbs drives about the same, how can I preserve over 15 years of photos?
The only whay I can think of is printing them but that would take 1000's of pounds.

closed

keep them in multiple places, and copy them to newer drives/media as they become available. A drive sat in a drawer is likely to last much more than 10 years.

googler

Copy to other hard drives, USB media, flash cards, CDRs, DVDRs, and as many other new media as are invented ...

neilwoods

Backup upto to CD or DVD, they last anywhere from 20 to 200 years, if kept in right condition.

Can even buy dedicated archive dvd, designed to last a possible 300 years.

DigForVictory

"Forever" is like "infinity" - how long exactly is your piece of string?

Why do you want to keep thousands of pounds worth of photos (paper degrades too) forever? Who in the future wants them, do you know?

If you want artistic recognition in the 22nd century, fine - multiple memory devices & a rolling program of testing & replacement in your lifetime & the devout hope your artistic executor is as conscientious.

If you want a personal collection of images stored & made publically available, ask local libraries and academic institutions if they would be interested in your archive? (Care becomes their problem, but likely you loose all rights over the material.)

If you want to have reminders in your twlight years in another 60 years time, two ideas occur. The first being editing so you only keep what you think you'll want (with the inherent risk in that of missing out a few shots). The second being that if you can tell what software format will still be working in a few decades time, good on you - me, I'd be paying for prints & photobooks. With a thoughtful eye on the fact that my parents black & white photos are still clear, but the colour ones aren't. More choices...

It's a sod. Formats change, assumptions as to minimums change with improvements. You can spend a lifetime running to stay in one place, or you can shrug & hang on to the shots that matter to you now.

The good news is with a lot of effort you can preserve photos for a long time. The bad news is that in another fifty years, you may not care as much about the photos.

Sorry this reads so cold, but I wasn't raised with "for ever" in common usage.

Mojisola

DigForVictory wrote: »

The good news is with a lot of effort you can preserve photos for a long time. The bad news is that in another fifty years, you may not care as much about the photos.

But younger family members might! And in a hundred years, descendants will be thrilled to find photos of the 20th and early 21st century.

As well as the advice in earlier posts, I would print out some of the photos for posterity - chose ones with people in and write names and connections of the back.

WTFH

Most photo paper will fade/degrade over time, so it's worth paying extra to get good quality stuff. The other option is to get them printed professionally in a book.

For electronic copies, keep one copy in a fire & EMP proof safe, keep another offsite, a third on the cloud and then just back up like you do with the rest of your computer.
Next, check and refresh each backup every month.
And finally, if the file format you have chosen is going to be made obsolete, then make sure you convert all the files to a newer, valid one.

RobTang

http://www.mdisc.com/ claims to last 1000 years....


Although whatever you choose will always require some maintenance and careful storage.

Sooler

Any qouted storage life is only 'upto' - and isn't the only limitation. It could get lost, damaged, destroyed, stolen.

It could fail after 1 day or sooner.

[Deleted User]

I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with 8 years of digital photography. I've got 130gb of family photos. We do occasionally go through and print ~500 shots out (4p a print at Costco) but there are thousands.. and I don't have the time to go through and select the best ones.

I currently keep them on an external HD, but i know i should make a redundant copy elsewhere

blackhawk2479

Cloud storage, e.g. Google Drive should be extremely safe, assuming the company doesn't fold or withdraw the service. Probably the best option if the volume of data is appropriate.

Failing that, hard disks are perfectly suitable, providing you have the appropriate redundancy in place. Hot-swappable home NAS solutions are good because they protect against single-drive failure, but off-site backups in case of fire are advisable too.