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Arhival quality CDRs aside, you also brought up the issue of a CD reader.

Even though it is ‘possible’ to maintain the integrity of images, documents, and other files, through media format swaps, just how realistic is this solution for the majority of people? Most people struggle with just keeping a backup of their Outlook PST file, you know?

On a side note, the passing of film-based cameras will be sad. Developing a roll of b&w film and then printing the negatives in a dark room is a load of fun. Very cool stuff…

The IBM guy is an idiot. The primary issue is not the stability of the media; it’s no problem to find CD-R media that is stable into the tens of decades, it just happens to be about four or five times as expensive as the dye-based CD-Rs.

The primary problem with CD-Rs is that the CD readers are going to start to disappear relatively soon and, when the interfaces that current CD readers use are obsoleted, it will become difficult to read them at all.

One of the reasons that the IBM guy is an idiot is that this has already happened in the tape world. I have a 1/2″ tape I wrote in 1986 that I have not been able to read for years. Nobody I know has a 1/2″ tape drive that actually works anymore.

The solution to this problem is not to treat your backups as archival, but rather as ephemeral. Archive management must be done via migration. The best way to approach that is to make the data as portable as possible. That means stuffing your data on the fastest, highest density media you can find.

That’s a hard drive, not CD-R or DVD-R or tape. I note that hard drive storage is also much more stable than typical CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, easily into the tens of years.

As the drive interfaces change (gonna be hard to hook up an old IDE drive pretty soon) you migrate the data from drive to drive. This is not very time consuming because the drive interfaces are relatively fast.

I have been using this technique for twenty years, migrating data from drive to drive as the systems change. These days I even back it up on attached (USB or FireWire).

The more critical problem for image (and document) management is proprietary formats. JPEG and TIFF have been stable for well over a decade but RAW formats change from model to model and it is already difficult to find support for some RAW formats. Nikon just screwed a bunch of people by deliberately encrypting certain RAW file information — it will become very hard to recover that information when (not if) they stop supporting the format. Unless reader code is publicly available it becomes unlikely that the software will be available very long.

The smart digital photographer will convert RAW formats to a stable format (hopefully DNG or something like that, but right now TIFF is your best bet) at the first sign of obsolescence of their RAW format, if not sooner. I’ve been using TIFF for my most important images but it is too bulky for storage of all of my digital photographs and I’m looking forward to an industry standard like DNG.

jim

The article title is not only wrong, it seems to be deliberately misleading and sensationalistic. Nikon is still going to sell two 35mm and one 85mm film cameras. They also will support any product for up to 10 years after the sale.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=130907&TICK=NIKON&STORY=/www/story/01-11-2006/0004247596&EDATE=Jan+11,+2006

Mike

still sux :p my 300 zoom lens on my canon slr is just very nice, better than a 10x on the kodak maybe Nikon will take trade ins as a promotion..:)

Slashdot just ran a story about a storage expert at IBM claiming that CDRs are only good from 2 to 5 years. He recommends a tape drive… a TAPE drive! It’s as if we haven’t advanced at all.

I think of this issue every time I go to a museum. I was at the DeYoung recently and studied the enormous stone tablets that are thousands of years old.

Does anybody have any confidence that one picture you take, or one word you write will be around 2000 years from now? How about 200 years from now? I don’t.

Loosing touch with the origins of ones craft / passion is something to mourn - while photoshop allows tremendous creativity, the challenges of the early darkroom is a difference that matters to the creative eye.

I know that we have assurance that media will be able to handle the aging of electronic files, but I still have negatives that are 50 years old - my disks from 15 years ago are not useful ….

Michael