Preserving photos for ever

albionrovers

I bought 2 x 64G Blackberry Playbooks when the price dropped to £129 a while back. All photos backed up twice with space to spare for music and movies.

epninety

I've had failures of archive DVD-R material after less than 10 years, though they were not 'brand name' items.
Currently I use writeable Blu-ray disks for backup and archive.

Several companies offer 'archive' grade BD-R media - some may be worth it, some probably not. I settle for using known brand media, multiple backups in several places, and hope for the best.

In the long run, you may be as likely to lose your backups due to the march of technology as anything else. Remember the BBC Domesday project?

Plan on moving your data to the 'next big thing' in storage media in 10 years or so, and repeat until you lose interest.

SD cards would seem a good bet, since even if there were no sd card readers, a competent hacker could build and program one pretty quickly - it doesn't require any high precision machinery and the basic electrical specs are well documented. Sadly data retention life of an SD card isn't guaranteed and may be as short as 5 years
SanDisk allegedly offers an SD WORM card (write once, read many) with 100year data retention, but I don't know where they could be bought. A shame, because if reasonably priced they could be an ideal solution.

And to echo what Mojisola said, all those photos could be very interesting to your grandkids, but much more so if you include notes on who/where/why etc..

bob_a_builder

all those photos could be very interesting to your grandkids, but much more so if you include notes on who/where/why etc..

Exactly !
what is the digital equivalent to the shoe box or biscuit tin full of slightly curling photos, with those all important dates and names of all those distant relatives and friends scribbled on the back
Hate to say it, but it might be that f###book is the nearest thing to it

esuhl

neilwoods wrote: »

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.

I thought consumer-writable disks (CD-Rs, DVD-Rs) were only expected to last around 10 years...?

Some CDs in my audio collection (i.e. commercial CDs) are started to show signs of degradation already. A couple are unplayable (despite being unscratched, stored in a cool dry cupboard in a centrally-heated house, and rarely played). I had to use EAC (Exact Audio Copy -- a program that can spend hours trying to carefully extract audio data from damaged disks) to try to recover the music, and that hasn't worked on every track. Those CDs are less than 20 years old. You can see the silver layer turning brownish and decaying under the laminate at the outer edge of the CDs.

Anyway, if a hard drive fails on average every ten years (3652 days, depending on leap years) and it takes you 30 days to notice, replace the drive and make another backup, then the chance of two disks failing within the time it takes to replace the drive would be (30/3652)^2 = 6.75*10^-5 = 0.0067% chance.

Store the pictures on three drives and there's 0.0000554% chance of all three drives failing in the same 30-day period. I think... (assuming my maths is right!)

EmmaxOx

No digital data storage is permanent I'm afraid.

Best practice is to make multiple backups using multiple media types. Have multiple redundancies. Archive type DVDs, flash drives, RAID type hard drive bays all help. There is no one shot solution.

Emma x

photogeek

I feel sorry for your loss and always fear this could happen to me. Storing pictures in the cloud is no real solution, who knows if Amazon or Google may disappear as suddenly as they arrived...?

For my family I make selection of pictures and print two photobooks per year (one summer and summer holidays and one winter, Christmas, family etc). I actually print two copies, one goes to my parents. Photo books are not the ideal solution, but they are nice, convenient to browse and give the sense of safety only tangibles can provide.

bluesnake

albionrovers wrote: »

I bought 2 x 64G Blackberry Playbooks... All photos backed up twice with space to spare for music and movies.

I'm with EmmaxOx. The problem is that some electronic components do not age well, like electrolytic capacitors and batteries. Even though unused, your devices may no longer work after a number of years. Apprently even in the cheaper DVDs the chemicals age over time.

My record with cheap CDs a good few years ago, managed to get 3 to 4 months of life out of them. This was due to poor quality/age, rather than mistreatment.

Similar solutions is not enough. One method no one talks of is the 'paper backup', and the right paper lasts 100's of years, but will the software still work?
http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134427-a-paper-based-backup-solution-not-as-stupid-as-it-sounds

InsideInsurance

Personally, store locally on a mirrored RAID solution and backup to the cloud.

Overtime keep up to date with technology and transfer them over as and when new methods become available. Give a kid today a VHS tape of your home movies and they'd struggle to be able to watch it even if the tape has survived. In 100 years time DVD players may have been totally forgotten about.

That said, I saw there was a project creating a time capsule for the future containing technical specifications of both media/ ports and file types so technology can be reproduced in the future to read our files (if they survive) after the technology has been forgotten about

PuzzledDave

There are two main causes of total loss:

Storage failure: The device it is all stored on fails. There are some companies that can to recover it anyway but charge a fair sum of course.

Major incident: Flood, fire, electrical fault, children with a drink of sticky fizzy....


In both cases the principal is the same - backups ! However it is vital the backup is NOT in the same place as the main storage since they are both vulnerable to a major incident. Good solution: backup is left in your parents/childs/friends house. Better solution, backup copy in your house, your parents house, your friends house and your office desk draw at work.

kbrumann

InsideInsurance wrote: »

In 100 years time DVD players may have been totally forgotten about.

The DVD will be forgotten in less than a century. Show a current sixth former a floppy disk and they wouldn't know what to do with it, but they would still be able to browse through a photo book.