To begin with, the hardware and storage media--magnetic tapes, disks, whatever--on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of discs can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a brick wall when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
Always an interesting subject. How many here set a time limit on storage of images taken for your clients? If you don't allow for digital file purchasing, do you try for long-term storage even if you don't let your clients know that?
p.1 #2 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
A good reason to sell prints or albums rather than selling Cd's. If you have your clients long term interest at heart that is how you should sell your product. Jobs for electronic media excepted of course.
p.1 #3 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Marcus Watts wrote:
A good reason to sell prints or albums rather than selling Cd's. If you have your clients long term interest at heart that is how you should sell your product.
That's a fairly limited view - it assumes your clients' desired end product is a print or an album. I work mostly in corporate and commercial portraiture and fashion. Clients would laugh at me if I offered to provide them a print or an album. In general, the images I shoot stay digital from the shutter click through the proofing and delivery all the way until they go to print as a magazine or piece of corporate collateral or a headshot in repro. I'd say that 75% of my finished images I've never seen printed, as the intended end results were electronic.
I keep both hard disk and optical backups of all of my work, and I do operate the hard disks a few times a year. I'd say that every 2-3 years I cycle the disks out for new ones, partly because larger capacities are available at cheaper prices and I can maintain the same number of disks while storing more information. It's not an infallible method, but I also dramatically less value from an image after a couple years, so my concern is more about recent work. My clients tend to have no value whatsoever for images after 2-3 years, and I have never had one looking to return to the well more than a year after the shoot.
p.1 #4 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Nothing will last forever.
Prints included. The dye used in making color prints will deterorate over time no matter how good the ink is.
Will prints last longer than magnetic storage media? Probably, but with the pace technology moves, I'd expect that to change within the next few years.
p.1 #7 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Marcus Watts wrote:
What? 200 year archival life not long enough for you?
Well ... that is the projected lifespan of some prints from tests conducted in a lab. I seriously doubt many of us will be around to see for sure how it works in the real world. Regardless of format/media there is some risk involved in all types of long-term storage.
Myself, I keep copies on 2 HD systems and a DVD copy off site. Thankfully digital storage is reasonably priced to be able to do so. Once a client's images have been delivered, I make no guarantees as to how long I will keep the images. Like shatterkiss, orders after the fact are few. So, mostly it is a labor I endure because I hate to delete anything.
p.1 #8 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Any long term predictive stability is a crap shoot. The way its done just does not mimic time. So ignore those ratings you see and go with several different methods and plan to replace them every so often.
The best method of archiving is to do it often. How or what is secondary.
p.1 #9 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Photoshelter Archive is offering some pretty good pricing, at about 50 dollars per 100 gigs of storage per year. That sounds pricey, but given the feature set, the fact that they have dual servers backups (one on each coast of the country), etc, well it figures that if you can upload your entire archive, and maintain it current, you could save by not having to buy backup drives and discs all the time.
p.1 #10 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
My first digital photos were stored on floppy discs.
When cheap CD burners came along, I copied my entire digital photo collection onto a single CD - with lots of room to spare.
When DVD burners got cheap, I copied all my CDs onto a handful of DVDs
Probably in a few years time, I will have a bluRay or similar burner on my PC and copy all my DVDs onto a handful of those disc.
Rinse and repeat for the rest of time. Each time I copy them, I am 'resetting' the degradation clock - as well as reducing the amount of media required for the original library. Plus, it's very easy to make multiple copies of each set of data.
p.1 #11 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Mr Flibble wrote:
When DVD burners got cheap, I copied all my CDs onto a handful of DVDs
That would be totally awesome to only need a handfull of disks. I currently have almost 400 DVDs of archive files ... when the next new medium comes along .... it will be quite a process to convert. But it is inevitable to make that conversion.
p.1 #12 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
butchM wrote:
That would be totally awesome to only need a handfull of disks. I currently have almost 400 DVDs of archive files ... when the next new medium comes along .... it will be quite a process to convert. But it is inevitable to make that conversion.
The good news is in a matter of months you will be able to fit your entire archive onto only 8 discs (they've just finalised the specs for a 51Gb HD-DVD)
Of course, I don't envy you when it comes to copying those 400 DVDs.....
p.1 #13 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
Mr Flibble wrote:
Each time I copy them, I am 'resetting' the degradation clock - as well as reducing the amount of media required for the original library.
You are also copying bad data that may have degraded. "Burned" media (CDs and DVDs) just don't last that long before data begins do go bad. Run error checking on disks and usually within a year there are data errors. The file may open and work OK, but soon it gets to a point where there will be issues or the file will not open. Taking these aging disks and copying them gets the good data and errors too. Unless you make new copies before there are errors you are asking for trouble.
Optical media is a bad choice for archiving, and trusting your data to just optical media is a very risky choice. It just does not last. Even pressed DVDs are not expected to last as long as people think (eg the retail movie DVDs you buy). Best plan is frequent copies on multiple media.
p.1 #14 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
CTYankee wrote:
You are also copying bad data that may have degraded. "Burned" media (CDs and DVDs) just don't last that long before data begins do go bad. Run error checking on disks and usually within a year there are data errors. The file may open and work OK, but soon it gets to a point where there will be issues or the file will not open. Taking these aging disks and copying them gets the good data and errors too. Unless you make new copies before there are errors you are asking for trouble.
Actually, you aren't copying bad data.
CDs and DVDs use Error Correction Code which will recreate good data when you read a disc by using Reed-Solomon coding. So even if there has been degradation on the disc, when you read it (and hence, copy it), you are retrieving a faithful copy of the original data. So a disc that is riddled with 'bit rot' can be used to create a new disc that perfectly matches the data that was originally stored on the first disc
It's a powerful code - the version that is used on a CD can cope with a continuous block of bad data 4,000 bits long (about 2.5mm of the surface on a CD).The code used on a DVD is even more powerful (I think it is something like 130% morepowerful)
p.1 #15 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of discs can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries.
Just to talk about this "statistic" for a moment...
Statistically, most people have more than the average number of legs, because the mean is not the mode.
When they say "only half of a collection of discs" they are quoting statistics from samples that include mostly low-end discs stored by many different methods--many of which may not have lasted a month.
This says almost nothing about samples from solely high-end archival media stored with care.
p.1 #16 · the digital afterlife or disposable media?
RDKirk wrote:
Just to talk about this "statistic" for a moment...
Statistically, most people have more than the average number of legs, because the mean is not the mode.
When they say "only half of a collection of discs" they are quoting statistics from samples that include mostly low-end discs stored by many different methods--many of which may not have lasted a month.
This says almost nothing about samples from solely high-end archival media stored with care.
Some pretty well done studies by 'enthusiasts' (computer geeks?) have shown that even the high end TY or 'Archival' gold disks show data loss (bit rot) in less than a year. While the doom and gloom of these statistics may be misleading, there is plenty of evidence to support that data loss happens far sooner and more frequently than expected.
