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So far, I've just been doing a "bucket transfer" - pour the stuff from old hard drive to new hard drive, repeat as necessary. Admittedly not very elegant, but it works so far. Optical is too small (even if a Blue-Ray device showed up tomorrow on my desk, it would still only back up 20 some odd GB at a time), and tape is too slow.

# posted by Anonymous 7:20 AM

Old digital photos are like any old file. Most are not worth keeping, but they may have some archival value. I take pictures of job sites to document construction progress. Occasionally a picture is worth keeping and I will move it to some sort of "best pictures" holding file. I don't see the problem. People will keep the pictures that matter to them using whatever technology is available.

Also, as good as digital cameras are, I've never been able to capture the nuances I can get with film. What's the point in upgrading digital cameras at $1000 bucks a pop when the old Canon AE-1 I bought 30 years ago does a better job for "art" shots. It doesn't make sense. Most of the photos we take aren't keepers.

Will from Lafayette, CO

# posted by Anonymous 7:47 AM

I copy them to my Wifes PC, then I have a breifcase on my PC for backup, Then I periodicaly Burn them to CD's.
I also keep a copy of the CD image on my server which I backup on DDS4 tapes 3 time a week.

rapcomp

# posted by Anonymous 8:11 AM

I back up stuff to CD and DVD, label it and store it. Every couple of months I go through the discs and trash stuff I know I won't ever look at again. If I think I'll use it again, it stays. Once something is six months old or older, I usually re-burn it or copy it to a hard drive.

# posted by Anonymous 8:26 AM

I think the real point is that none of the digital formats are actually archive quality in terms of lifespan. Hard drives die eventually, and burned CDs / DVDs don't last very long unless you are very careful about how you store them. There are still photographs around from over 100 years ago - magnetic and optical storage have a long way to go to match that.

Sure, you can say most of the stuff isn't really worth keeping - but YOU want to be the one that makes that decision, not the lifespan of your storage medium.

# posted by Anonymous 8:50 AM

There has been a technology out and in use for some years/decades now, I can't remember the name of the system but maybe this would be a good project for your intern to go Google and find it, where digital information is transformed into hardcopy output that looks like an 8-1/2x11 typical sheet with a giant, glorified barcode from tip to toe on the typing paper sheet.

Supposedly, this system can encode something like one Meg per sheet. If you were to use acid-free, archival-grade typing paper, since it is ink-on-paper, if you took reasonable care of it, the digital information encoded on same would last basically indefinitely.

The system, if memory serves me correctly, was developed for the Library Of Congress, although though don't quote me on that, and then was made available commercially to anyone who wanted to buy their own system.

# posted by Anonymous 8:53 AM

For me it's a moving target. As the technology changes and improves I'll migrate the pictures to what works at the time. Presently I burn all shots to CD once a month together with the past two months. This gives me 3 CD's with copies. Additionally, every 3 months I make a copy of the backup and store that one off-site.

Like any thing you value, you need to use some common sense on how/where you store it. Mine are in a file cabinet in the basement. If the house burns down then they are gone, except for the off-site ones. As I get older, the less I fret about such things. From my own experience, pictures without identifying information are a bigger problem. How often have you gone through "aunt Mae's" box of pictures and tried to figure out who the heck is that person?

As far as film/prints, if you want to really ruin your day, there's a book out there by a gent of the last name Wilhem, or soemthing like that, where he did a 20+ year research project and the results aren't very nice, especially if you are using Kodak film and prints. Not surprisingly, Kodak was not cooperative and helpful with his research project. Kodak spells archival "GREED".

# posted by Anonymous 9:20 AM

I lost all of my Honeymoon photos...(well, not "all" some were stashed in a super safe spot ;-)

Lost all of our Vacation snaps, and all of our photos of family visits.

Had a HD Crash, and the CDs just plain dont read...

As soon as we build a server for our home business, there will be a partition for our personal stuff that will be backed up with the standard tape rotation.

That's as safe as it can be made.

# posted by Anonymous 9:51 AM

Server for your personal photos! Great idea. Just don't connect a computer to it that's also connected to the Internet or there'll be a whole new pile of MILF photos for the world to view.

As for everybody else's answers, it occurred to me while reading them that (somewhat boreingly in comparison, I admit, but related to an article I did about 8 months ago) that the healthcare folks must be going through heck now that HIPA wants them to store everything for evermore. I mean, if we can't figure it out on the relatively small scale, YIKES!

Must have something to do with the fact that the average consumer hard drive capacity has gone from ~200MB in 1992 to ~120GB in 2004...

# posted by Bill 10:45 AM

Something that I think a lot of the comments are missing is the logevity of the data format - not just the media itself. Even if your CD-R is well cared for and still readable 30 years from now, will you or your children be able to get a computer equipped with a drive that can read a CD-R disk without visiting a museum? Even if you can read the disk, in 30 years will you have any program that can work with the file format?

For example, until last year I had a small stack of Bernoulli Box cartridges in the basement. 15 years ago, all of the development workstations I worked on had Bernoulli drives installed, and we kept our entire codebase on the 5Mb and 10Mb cartridges. Even assuming I could get the hardware, I'd have difficulty getting one of these drives working today: they depend on a proprietary ISA-bus interface card and drivers for Ms-DOS. How many motherboards today have ISA slots? How many people have Ms-DOS boot disks? What about in another 15 years? Even less ancient, but equally unreadable, I have a number of Apple ][ and C-64 5.25" floppies, and Amiga 3.5" disks. What assurance do we have that CD-R or DVD-R won't similarly fall by the wayside?

Similarly, 20 years ago we had our business documents in dBase II, WordStar, and VisiCalc. How many of today's computer users would be able to open a VisiCalc file, even assuming they had a way of reading it off of an 8" or 5.25" CPM-formatted floppy disk? It's likely that if the disk was well cared for, the media is still readable today. In 20 years, what guarantee will you have that you will be able to read a Microsoft Access, Excel or Adobe Acrobat file?

For archival purposes, human-readable acid-free ink on archival paper is one of your best bets. If reasonably well cared-for, the media is stable over a long period of time (hundreds to thousands of years), and the data format will be understandable by humans for at least that long. With almost any other storage medium, you run the risk that any data that isn't "live" (continously copied from machine to machine and updated to a modern file format) may become inaccessable once too much time has passed.

# posted by D.J.Wildstar 11:12 AM

I send the digital photos I want to keep to Kodak, they print them professionally and send me prints. These should last as long as photo prints would.

I've tried printing myself but haven't found a combination of paper and ink (at a reasonable price) that survives very long.

I use the pin-it-to-a-corkboard-in-the-sun-for-a-year stress test. So far only the professional prints have survived.

# posted by Anonymous 11:52 AM

I tried that with an old girlfriend. She didn't last too long either. Now I send my girlfriends to Kodak and they print out pictures for me.... (It's been a loooong day.)

# posted by Bill 1:32 PM

I have lots of 20 year old data including some being 30 years old, and it's surviving a lot better than my 30 year old pictures. All of it has become amazingly easier to move and archive since the advent of networks and graphics standards.

Why worry about only 1% of the archived pictures survive the next 100 years ... 99.9% of it doesn't need to.

# posted by MissingFrame 1:49 PM

I do love computers, but there is a sense of digital information being a bit like smoke. A little wind of change, and it's gone. The internet is like that. Will any content from this era find itself into a collection for our grandchildren, like a Sears or Wards catalogue, or a magnificent building. Will there be a museum of web sites, or e-books, from the past?

Will from Lafayette, CO

# posted by Anonymous 3:25 PM

I see a mention about the wonderful Kodak prints and how long they last. If you desire to go through life with rose-colored glasses and still believe in Santa Claus, don't check the below listed book out from your local library or download its' contents from www.wilhelm-research.com. You'll get upset and want to puke, and that could be harmful to your keyboard!

The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures

By
Henry Wilhelm
with
contributing author
Carol Brower

Originally Published
in 1993

# posted by Anonymous 7:46 PM

I currently have 8GB of photos taken with a camera that I got less than 2 years ago. Nearly 12,000 individual shots taken in that span of time. And I'm nowhere near professional - I'm just a photo-whore. And how.

My hard drives are growing incrementally, in accordance with Moore's Law or whatever, but then again, so are the sizes of the images. At 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, those old 640x480 photos that used to fill my WHOLE SCREEN are looking a little, well, meager.

I end up moving every year or two, and I tend to use Maxtor drives, so everything dies and my data is mostly lost, except for what was haphazardly backed up on discs here and there. I have no idea.

Conclusion: I have no coherent strategy. I just kinda fly by the seat of my pants. And I need a new HD before this one dies.

Also: Maxtor sucks. Anybody know how to CHEAPLY recover a 40G drive? terry.cabeen at gmail. ;p
Nobody?
Didn't think so.

So it's a bad solution, but I hate paper photos. I hate paper in general.

# posted by Terry 8:11 PM

Terry, it's not the drive you're recovering. It's the data. Maxtor routinely replaced hard drives for me, at no cost and often with drives that were higher capacity than those that died, while they were under warranty. It's a commodity item. No big deal. Your data, on the other hand, is either worth the cost or not. If we're talking "priceless" information, any cost is a bargain. Perhaps that great shot of your sneaker precariously balanced on the coke bottle is worth a little less.

# posted by Bill 8:24 PM

I use Seagate drives. I even have an old 1.2 gig from 1995 that still operates with no trouble in a slave configuration on an old PC. I have 6 seagate drives, and I've not had one fail. The only drive that I've had that failed was an IBM Deathstar 20 gig, which lasted 8 months. I know that the lifespan of drives is limited, so I keep copies of the digital pictures on at least 2 drives at all times. When a drive gets upgraded, I keep it. I then copy the content to the new drive and keep the second newest drive.
I also make an optical copy, to keep at my place of work.
If you continue to migrate your files and file formats to the next technology, you have a fighting chance of keeping your archive.

# posted by metermax 8:39 PM

But Mr. Metermax, you realize what you're doing, don't you? We were supposed to reduce the paper office with the digital world of computers --but not necessarily at the cost of promulgating the silicon office in exchange.

# posted by Bill 9:23 PM

It's kinda of funny you bring this up. The military had run into this situation a few years ago when it started digitizing it's archival data. They quickly realized the limited lifespans of any type of digital medium and format. Their solution was to step backwards and go back to paper and microfiche for archival storage of long term information such as personell records and medical records. However, they are still searching for a long term digital format due to the space savings in storage that would create. Because believe you me, the army alone has a lot of records they like to keep.

# posted by Anonymous 1:24 AM

I'd say, Bill, that you have to pay to play. If you truly care about the information, you have to move it in a timely fashion and maintain it. Otherwise, it must not mean enough to you. I don't know about you, but digital pictures for me mean even MORE than those old paper ones. Negatives were a pain to catalog, and they always contained every shot that was made. Those digital photos were the best of the best, the ones that made the cut and remained saved on the camera, and then to my drive. Who knows what future printing or display technology might make them look even better in the future? They have to survive at all costs.

# posted by metermax 9:53 AM

Acknowledged, but I now have just about a terabyte of storage attached to my PC. Maybe 300GB in total is still available space. I have 500+ DVDs filled with stuff. There are only so many ATA, SATA, USB, and FireWire ports to which I can attach more drives. And that's not counting what's on the other active 5 PCs. There has to be a limit, or at least a consistent solution, that doesn't create the "dirt under the rug" effect where the mound keeps getting bigger and bigger and, eventually, impassable.

# posted by Bill 11:20 AM

Wow, that is a lot of stuff. You need the superman crystal storage!

# posted by metermax 7:30 PM

Yeah, but then Jor-el would try to get me to take over the world... (And in messing around in this venue, I've now found almost ever Hard Edge column Alice and I did between 1998 and 2004... 143K words! EEEKK!)

# posted by Bill 4:32 PM

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