Photos. How Do you save them FOREVER?

[Industrial Toys]

I wish there were pictures of this exact area I live, in pioneer days. The old owner once came by with her grandkids and promised to drop off some pictures so I could scan them, but never did.

Short of buildings that are still there and where they used to be, it's often impossible to get ones bearings with old photographs.

 

[Fallon]

Writable CDs actually have a pretty short lifespan. The organic dyes & things degrade after 5-10 years. Not to mention it's getting harder to find a new machine with a CD or DVD drive. It's not to long before they go the way of the floppy drive.

As an IT professional for several decades... backups, backups, backups. If data doesn't exist in multiple locations it just takes 1 oops or random failure to loose it all.

No format lasts forever, they all degrade or become obsolete. So you'll either need to let stuff go at some point of convert it to the next generation.

For my parents I recommended a cloud backup solution. Its automatic & good enough. Personally I have a more technical solution with a NAS to keep my stuff more private. But I'm also not as diligent as I should be at times backing stuff up.

For most people I'd recomend flash drives or the cloud. But make sure you dont rely on the cloud as your only option. It's as acceptable to an oops or company going out of business as anything else. You need at least 2 separate storage systems if you want a decent chance of things lasting.

 

[/pine]

Digital images in most formats can be saved as text tiles that are easy to compress and archive...

 

[MossRoad]

Writable CDs actually have a pretty short lifespan. The organic dyes & things degrade after 5-10 years. Not to mention it's getting harder to find a new machine with a CD or DVD drive. It's not to long before they go the way of the floppy drive.

As an IT professional for several decades... backups, backups, backups. If data doesn't exist in multiple locations it just takes 1 oops or random failure to loose it all.

No format lasts forever, they all degrade or become obsolete. So you'll either need to let stuff go at some point of convert it to the next generation.

For my parents I recommended a cloud backup solution. Its automatic & good enough. Personally I have a more technical solution with a NAS to keep my stuff more private. But I'm also not as diligent as I should be at times backing stuff up.

For most people I'd recomend flash drives or the cloud. But make sure you dont rely on the cloud as your only option. It's as acceptable to an oops or company going out of business as anything else. You need at least 2 separate storage systems if you want a decent chance of things lasting.

Generally, that 5-10 years is the shelf life for UNWRITTEN CD media. Once you write it, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs have a much longer expected life.

 

[Fallon]

Generally, that 5-10 years is the shelf life for UNWRITTEN CD media. Once you write it, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs have a much longer expected life.

A large chunk of my decade old writable optical media failed when I tested them out a couple years ago. I copied off what I could then tossed all of them.

 

[Industrial Toys]

Interesting. Worth trying.

I don't see why a SS Hard Drive would be any better or reliable than a USB drive. And then you need the controller for that particular drive. I still have a ZIP drive in this XP machine.

 

[Motorboatin]

Anyone that wants to save electronic images needs to google this phrase

Why is JPEG a lossy file?

 

[Industrial Toys]

Interesting. I started reading, but I must be too stupid to understand it. I thought the whole merit of digital images is the exact duplication of one copy to the next, from the next. So it's the compression that degrades the image? What good is that? Like putting all your 8x10 glossy prints in a garbage compactor for neater storage! lol

 

[Motorboatin]

Transferring from one drive to another or uploading to cloud based storage doesn’t degrade the file. It is everything else people do to the file that ruins it. Everyone edits their photos but I recommend storing the originals files in a lossless format

Photography is a hobby of mine and all my photos are stored on multiple drives with automated backups plus cloud based storage. I have photos that my grandparents took and I would like my grandchildren to experience the same with my photos. None are in JPEG format

 

[MossRoad]

Interesting. Worth trying.

I don't see why a SS Hard Drive would be any better or reliable than a USB drive. And then you need the controller for that particular drive. I still have a ZIP drive in this XP machine.

I remember management forcing us to roll out ZIP drives for file storage back in the 90's. We told them it was a bad idea. Then the click of death happened on several archive disks and we were allowed to ditch them.

Click of death - Wikipedia