Food for thought: Passing on the legacy

[PacAce]

Most of yesterday and part of today, I spent some time going through my father's 45 to 50 year old collection of b/w negatives of pictures he had taken when my siblings and I were still in our diapers. I used the 10D with a macro lens to take pictures of the negative, invert them to positive and then make b/w prints out of them. Some of these pictures were those I hadn't seen since I was a kid.

Anyway, as I was going through these negatives, I was thinking about how I, with my digital camera, was going to leave a similar legacy for my kids and future grand kids many years from now when I am no longer around on this Earth. Fortunately for my grown kids, I shot all their pictures when they were growing up on film so I have a whole bunch of negatives for them to "find" when I'm gone. But how about the future grand kids. If I or my kids shoot pictures of them with a digital camera what latent image is going to get left behind to be "discovered" years from now by them. I doubt they'll be able to take one of my CD-Rs or DVD-Rs where all my RAW images are stored and say, "Hey, looky! It's one of Gramp's ancient DVD-R. Let's see what's on it! Maybe there are some pictures of us when we were still in our diapers!"

Are they going to be missing out because there may not be any film records of their growing years?

[msvirick]

The best legacy one leaves behind, is ,that is imprinted and left in your heart. My wife is a excellent mother and a grand mother, but very shy of the camera. She always says to those that bring a camera close to her, to remember her as she did for them, and not as she looked. Prehaps there is some wisdom to this.
However I make DVDs of my images from my 10D, and then make more DVDs again, and give a copy of each to my children, who I hope will pass on their children.
Pictures are precious, I see images in black and white ,of my late immigrant father in his childhood, I see in him, my grandson, and many others. I wonder if people really die.

[gsmx2]

Ah, the trouble with electronic media is that the media outlasts the commonly accessable means of playing it. 8-track tapes, 5 1/4" floppies immediately come to mind. DVDs will follow.

So print out the best and most important pictures and store them as best you can. Then in fifty years when your grandchildren discover them, they can see them, and photograph them into the 500 trillibyte flash memory chip that everyone has imprinted into their brains to hold all their fond memories as a means of combatting the ravages of age.

Put them to paper...doing anything else is like writing a novel in sand.

gsm x2

[defordphoto]

Use whatever current technology is available and then convert them as technology catches and and passes what you currently have. You've got blue laser DVD's coming next with another super-high-storage DVD on its heels. We will soon be storing on one DVD, 200 4.7gb DVD's. Dual layer DVD writers are also on the horizon. It's hard to keep up.

There was talk of the life of a CD or DVD. No one really knows at this poijt as they have not been around along enough, but some of the cheaper CDs are already failing due to moisture getting between the two plastic halves and then corroding the metal plate in between which is the actual data.

I wish I would have saved that article because in the long run it said the best way to preserve your digital photos was to convert them to film and store them properly.

I keep my master DVD's stored in a sealed, light-proof container. The working DVD's just kinda hang out with everything else.

All we can do it try and keep up with this stuff. It moves so fast.

[msnow]

How about packing a laptop w/DVD player in your time capsule along with your DVD or CD media?

[mpkirby]

PacAce wrote:
But how about the future grand kids. If I or my kids shoot pictures of them with a digital camera what latent image is going to get left behind to be "discovered" years from now by them.

This is going to be a big deal in about 10 or 15 years. Most technical savy users (read most of us) wil adapt without a problem. We will manage our archives, and upgrade from CD to DVD to Blue Laser DVD as technology moves forward (simiarly moving from JPG to JPG 2000 to whatever follows).

Most consumers, however, do not understand the issues associated with long-term archiving and data-refresh.

My suggestions (whenever I have gotten the opportunity to bug the ears of those who make photoalbum software) is to build such maintenance tasks into the software.

Imagine a world where you boot up your PC, go to your album software to download some new images, and it says "time to upgrade disk #3". You pop in a new Blue-laser DVD, and it asks you for each of the 10 old CD's that it is going to replace. Upon completion you just throw it away. Perhaps it even lets you do one or 2 and the rest later.

The key is making technology do the drudgery part, and getting people out of the "remembering to have to do it" job.

Only then will a greater share of the masses begin to do this.

But I would be willing to bet the vast majority of Digital Picture users do not even have their pictures backed up to CD. Imagine the disappointment when they find 3 years worth of pictures gone....

Mike

[boBquincy]

I do a lot of (digital) scrapbooking and hear the 'digital doom & gloom' from the 'paper' scrappers all the time. Here is what I wrote:

*I heard that today's digital files won't be readable in 20 years.

"This may be an issue for a large data storage facility but it is not a big concern for the average person. Copy all work to name-brand CD-Rs which are projected to be good for more than 50 years. In the event CDs become obsolete, all that needs to be done is to transfer the data to whatever new storage media is in vogue (and this will be way less than 50 years). At today's speeds that might take a few hours and it's getting faster every day. By the way, CDs have been around for 20 years and show no signs of going away."

Fwiw, I keep copies of my images on an internal hard drive, CDs, and also on an external hard drive (that goes in a small safe). I may soon copy my CDs to DVDs, although at this time the external hard drive appears less expensive and more convenient.

Color negatives, color prints, etc. are all made with dyes, that are fading. Our digital images can last longer than silver technology, if they are stored properly. What that 'properly' is may be subject to debate but the MTBF of a hard drive is almost amazing.

5-1/4" floppy drives are still available, I have one (in the closet, not in my computer). ;)


boB

[boBquincy]

I do a lot of (digital) scrapbooking and hear the 'digital doom & gloom' from the 'paper' scrappers all the time. Here is what I wrote:

*I heard that today's digital files won't be readable in 20 years.

"This may be an issue for a large data storage facility but it is not a big concern for the average person. Copy all work to name-brand CD-Rs which are projected to be good for more than 50 years. In the event CDs become obsolete, all that needs to be done is to transfer the data to whatever new storage media is in vogue (and this will be way less than 50 years). At today's speeds that might take a few hours and it's getting faster every day. By the way, CDs have been around for 20 years and show no signs of going away."

Fwiw, I keep copies of my images on an internal hard drive, CDs, and also on an external hard drive (that goes in a small safe). I may soon copy my CDs to DVDs, although at this time the external hard drive appears less expensive and more convenient.

Color negatives, color prints, etc. are all made with dyes, that are fading. Our digital images can last longer than silver technology, if they are stored properly. What that 'properly' is may be subject to debate but the MTBF of a hard drive is almost amazing.

5-1/4" floppy drives are still available, I have one (in the closet, not in my computer). ;)


boB

[PacAce]

bobquincy wrote:
5-1/4" floppy drives are still available, I have one (in the closet, not in my computer). ;)
boB

Funny you should mention that. I still have my 5-1/4" floppy (it's a quad density drive) and I'm looking right at it as it sits right in under my under my crt monitor. It's not hooked up to my computer right now but I used to have it connected to my Commodore Amiga during it's heydays.

But, I digress. Getting back to our discussing, the problem I see with keeping our archives on CDs or DVDs and "upgrading" them to newer media as technology progresses is the practicality of getting several years worth of old media so that they can be transferred to newer media. I would imagine only the really dedicated would have the discipline to do that over a period of 5, 10 or 20 years or longer. Maybe people will do it for the first time but as the collection gets bigger, I'm sure there will be less and less motivation to keep all the archive up to the current level of technology. With film or other "physical" media, you just put them away (in the proper environment) and forget about them. Years from now, they'll still be useable as-is, as it was the first time it was created.

I'm not saying the film is the answer but with the optical media, the onus is on us to keep it current or face the risk of losing the data forever. There's got to be a better answer than optical media. Not sure what that is but that's food for thought. :)

[msnow]

I would suspect there will be a pretty good cottage industry for converson from our antiquated media to whatever is being used at the time. Sort of like 8/super 8mm movie film conversion to tape or DVD is.

[defordphoto]

Well, I wouldn't get too paranoid about it. It's not like we're going to wake up in the morning and our CDs and DVDs are rendered useless. Just use the best technology available at hand and store it properly and move on.

[mpkirby]

RFMSports wrote:
Well, I wouldn't get too paranoid about it. It's not like we're going to wake up in the mroning and our CDs and DVDs are rendered useless. Just use the best technology available at hand and store it properly and move on.

No. Much more likely people will forget about older archives, copy new photo's off using newer media, and then die, or have 50'th wedding aniversaries.

Then those of us...em..My kids...Will try to sneak in and take some of my 40 year old CDs so they can make some kind of scrapbook, and be frustrated because their old man (I hate refering to myself like that) was too lazy to copy CDs onto hyper-dual density quad frequency multi-layer DVD-X technology.

Then they spend a weekend rooting around in my closet for my old P4 1.4 ghz pc that I refused to throw out (because I'm old).

Mike

[chris.bailey]

food for thought indeed. I have now been shooting dig for about five years and archive a months pics onto CD, i,e 1 or 2 per month. I therefore have some 100 CD's as an archive though I also have everthing backed up on an onboard mirror drive and an external hard drive.

Most new CD technologies at present are backward compatable so my DVD writer will read and write CD's. There may well come a time when that wont be possible meaning I will have to copy all those CD's onto the new media. Fortunately it is all relatively cheap and the storage volumes are tending to keep pace with our needs for increasing file sizes made necessary by the resolution race.

My conclusion is that I am the guardian of my digital data and will need to manage it up to the time my kids are old enough to take it on. I have recently taken all my parents slides, negs, prints and am converting them to digital. I have some over 100 years old so I am now the guardian of several generations of images.

[Derek Smith]

I think that the future might lay in internet based 'life archives'. Internet archive storage is quite safe as it tends to be safely mirrored.

As the cost of internet based storage falls It is likely that many of us will back up our working stocks into this archive where it will remain safe (so long as we pay the bills) from media obsoletion, because the service providers will continually upgrade their storage facilities as technology advances, taking our data with it.

The only risk then will come from format death. Just as media dies with evolution, so too will storage formats die as new and ever more powerful formats are developed and win the format 'arms race'.

Imagine the day when .CRW is remembered by only a few and software that can read it no longer exists. A few decades ago my employer used a word processor called 'MyWord'. Files saved in that format would today be unreadable by any wordprocessor on the market.

Just the same as old banknotes stored under the bed become obsolete and cease to be legal tender, so also will file formats cease to be supported or usable.

The risk is less likely to be present with popular formats such as .TIF or .JPG, but marginal formats such as .CRW are at the greatest risk of redundancy. We must hope that the 'War of the Raw's' is soon settled and a defacto .RAW becomes established. Then all we will have to worry about is how we migrate all our .CRW files into the new standard.

Derek

[defordphoto]

Okay. Format death. Though I am sure there are some formats that have died over the past 25 years. I doubt there is a picture file out there that there isn't some software package somewhere that can't load it.

I had someone send me some goofy freaking .pcx file the other day. I don't even recognize that format. But it loaded just fine. We also have no problem loading Amiga TIFF files from that old, dead (awesome) computer.

I understand the concern, but there sure seems to be a whole lot of worrying going on here when there is so much out there to shoot.

What I'm saying is that the sky is not falling and if you're TRULY worried that much about it, convert your images to film.

[pradeep1]

I usually do the suggested re-archiving of all old files and media onto more current formats every few years or when I upgrade a computer. I also archive all the programs that can access and read those formats with those archives. I also archive written instructions on how to use those programs. Our technical diligence will take our pictures maybe 50-100 years out into the future, but beyond that, I don't know how we can archive our materials for posterity unless we teach our children/grandchildren how to continue this process. Printing is an option, but not one that I am fond of now to archive my vast collection.

It might be useful to archive our old machines so that our kids can access the files, right? I think most programs can still be run on, at least emulated on, future machines. Just imagine all those cheesy DOS games that still can be emulated in Windows XP. You might want to archive the emulators as a precautionary measure, with instructions of course.

[defordphoto]

pradeep1 wrote:
...unless we teach our children/grandchildren how to continue this process.

I could be wrong but I think we'll probably still have schools in the future, or at least some form of education or some sort. And unless things change drastically, these kids — like the kids of today — will be at the forefront of technology and I'm pretty darn sure they will know what to do.