Long Term Digital Storage

What are most people doing about storing their images long term?

I've read enough posts to see that alot of people are using external hard drives as back-ups, but what about all those pictures.that you really don't need sitting around (lets say you've had them a couple years) taking up space, but you know you shouldn't just get rid of them?

I guess I'm asking, "What's going to last?". Is DVD or BD an option? I haven't been that impressed with the reliability of most of the external HDs (based on user reviews) and so I figure if they have issuses during normal use, you wouldn't really expect to fill one up with "archives" and then store it for 10+ yrs. without a high probability of something happening to it. Then of course you have the question of how long DVD and BD will be used/adequate.

They ALL go to die just matter of time.

I delete the images I don't want to keep right away. That helps a lot with storage requirements.

Every storage device will fail. The key is having multiple copies of data, and migrating to new storage devices occasionally. When a drive fills I buy a bigger one and copy the data over, and put the old drive in a drawer, so I have some extra backups too. Plus as well as onsite backups I have two different offsite backups.

I only use hard disks, optical media are too slow and too small.

tim wrote in post #12093747
Every storage device will fail. The key is having multiple copies of data, and migrating to new storage devices occasionally. When a drive fills I buy a bigger one and copy the data over, and put the old drive in a drawer, so I have some extra backups too. Plus as well as onsite backups I have two different offsite backups.

That's all pretty much what I thought. I just started thinking about this after talking with an older family photographer who has boxes of film negatives and proofs that go back many years. That made me wonder if pro photographers are keeping their digital photos around like that and if so, "how".

I dunno how long Blu-ray lasts, but DVDs supposedly aren't reliable for more than 7 or 8 years. HDDs need to be replaced after about 15 years, if they don't die first.

HDDs are still the best method. Tons of storage space and cheap, so you can have lots of backups.

You could get the gold dvd-r's which almost lasts 30 years. They are made just for archival storage.

I just don't trust DVDs. Sometimes you write then in one PC and can't read them in another PC right away.

Multiple copies on multiple media is best. Hopefully one day it will be practical and economic to store images in the cloud, on backed up raid arrays, but because of file sizes and bandwidth limits it's not yet, at least for most people.

My opinion is that SSD or usb Flash Drive should be used for archival storage. From an online article:

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

Interesting...

archiving using any form of digital interface will ultimately only be useful as long as the interface exists, and the file format is readable.

Keeping IDE drives isn't really sensible now, USB & SATA is going to dissapear in time. Anyone remember using 1.4m floppy discs? 750k floppy discs? punched cards?

There will always be points in time where archive formats will need to be changed, in order to be useable in the future. "Long term" meaning more than 10 years (to me) would make me wonder wether the effort of storage of photo's on technology capable of surviving the time is worth it given the likelyhood of the interface not being around after that time period...

Best we can do is store data for the time being, and convert when we need to.

Yep, the migration to new formats and interfaces is important. I think i'm out of IDE drives now, they're all SATA, but they also have USB interfaces on their enclosures. Next time I migrate it will probably be to the faster version of SATA, and USB 3.0. It's also why I keep RAW, DNG, and jpeg.