Digital Photo Warning

[dlndavid]

Stumbled across this article.
here


By JoAnne Purtan
March 14, 2006

Many people save their digital pictures on CD thinking they’ll last a lifetime. Your memories may, but the quality of your pictures could be diminished in just a few years.

The report comes from PC World Magazine. They talked to a physicist and storage expert from IBM and what they report may have you thinking twice about how you store your pictures.

Elizabeth Copeland and her family spent 9 days on vacation in Hawaii and they have a hundred pictures to forever remember their trip.

Elizabeth downloads the pictures to her hard drive for safekeeping many people then burn those pictures to CD, but it now appears over time those digital photos could fade.

PC World Magazine says home burned CDs are not the same as store bought CDs, they do not have the same protective layers and the data can degrade in as little as 5 years and become impossible to read.

It is not easy to distinguish high-quality burnable CDs from low-quality ones because few companies use life span as a selling point.

Printing your pictures is one recommendation experts have another is to store the photos on an external hard drive
According to the PC World article, magnetic tapes are the best storage option. They can have a life span of 30 to 100 years.

Experts say you can extend the life of a burned CD a bit by storing it in a cool, dark space. Other experts indicate CDs and DVDs can last up to 10 years. The bottom line, don’t count on them always being there. Take backup precautions so you don’t lose your memories.

 

[justleesa]

so, on the external dive it is safer than on a cd? How safe and secure is a HD? I have one...just wondering if I should take my stuff of the cd's and put them on the HD...

 

[stiebs]

Hmm.. nothing new year. Not sure if I like the wording "quality of your pictures could be diminished" and "over time those digital photos could fade". Should read "if you can't read the CD, you've lost your pictures".

If you can't get the bits off the CD you've lost it, you can't resurrect the picture like you can a two-decade old print or negative.

Printing is a solution, but photos printed out of your run-of-the-mill inket printer on run-of-the-mill inket paper aren't even going to last as long as a CD thats left out in the sun.

Saving to an external hard drive is good, but there's still a risk that that'll go belly up.

Yes, tape has proven time and time again to be the longest lasting digital storage for archival purposes, but if you've got backups on a tape from 5 - 10 years ago, and your tape drive heads are stuffed, tape technology still moves quick enough that you may struggle to find a tape drive today that's compatible with your old tape.

I keep all my photos in RAW format on my main hard drive. Each week I do an incremental backup (only changed/new files) to an external hard drive. Each month I do a full backup, and burn to DVD. Means I get a lot of DVDs, but its a full backup each time, so if one DVD does bite the dust, there's a good chance I'll get the same files off another one.

 

[justleesa]

at my LPS they offer these high quality 300 year (j/k I don't remember the exact time frame, but I know it's long) gold CD'ss, anyone hear of those?

 

[stiebs]

so, on the external dive it is safer than on a cd? How safe and secure is a HD? I have one...just wondering if I should take my stuff of the cd's and put them on the HD...

An external drive is not really any safer than a CD. It is always possible that it will stop working, or get corrupt sectors. Hard drives are getting better, but there is always risk.

You'll fit just under 1 gigabyte of data on a CD.
You'll fit just under 5 gigabytes of data on a DVD.
You can fit close to half a terabyte of data on an external HDD.

If you can't read a single CD out of your collection, you still have most of your photos. If you can't read your external HDD, you've lost the lot.

Your best bet is to cover yourself by keeping as many copies of your photos (or any other important data) on as many different types of media as seems reasonable to you.

 

[RonFrank]

I think the external hard drive reference was suggesting to put them on an external HD as WELL as having them on the internal drive, and backed up.

The best way to ensure your photo's are safe is to not trust any one form of backup, and backup frequently. I am going to start backing up may entire images base every quarter onto DVD. I also have an an external HD backup, and I have the originals on CD's from when I backed them up from my media (which I generally do before downloading them).

I recently had a HD crash, and guess what. My Nero compressed image DVD backup was worthless. This is something else to consider, make sure you test your restore ability PRIOR to a must have restore sitiation like I was going through.

The bottom line was that I ended up moving images off an old computer, AND using my original CD's (some as old as 2002.. no problem BTW) AND recovering some of my crashed HD onto another HD. This was a HUGE pain in the rear, and I will never allow myself to get into this type of situation again.

Backup to more than one media location.

Backup to CD or DVD on a regular bases (FULL BACKUPS, not just incremental).

Make DAMN sure that your backup software can actually recover files (unlike that piece of crap NERO compress junk) from the backup media.

By doing full backups on a regular basis you make sure that you have recent, and multiple copies of your images, so if a disk does go bad, you likely have anything that's not brand new on an older backup as well.

Also images will not fade on digital media. They will either be readable, or not. If not sometimes cleaning the disk can help, but not always.

Harddrive from my long time experience in both the PC world, and corporate world fail often, and fail hard.

RAID'ing the drives is another way to have backups, and what many business users do. However there are some serious trade-off using RAID, and one has to know a bit about RAID, and how best to implement that solution.

For even the small business professional just having good backups, and maybe a HD disk mirror is likely enough.

 

[stiebs]

at my LPS they offer these high quality 300 year (j/k I don't remember the exact time frame, but I know it's long) gold CD'ss, anyone hear of those?

You can certainly get archival quality optical media, but I also have to question the logic about a CD with a claimed life of 300 years for a technology which is only 20 years old.

I also have a hard time deciding what format to keep my photos in. Assuming I can still read my DVDs on my computer in 10 or 20 years time, will I still be able to open the image files. So I keep a copy of my image conversion tools with my photos. But will that still work on the computers and operating systems of the future?

 

[RonFrank]

I also have a hard time deciding what format to keep my photos in. Assuming I can still read my DVDs on my computer in 10 or 20 years time, will I still be able to open the image files. So I keep a copy of my image conversion tools with my photos. But will that still work on the computers and operating systems of the future?

This is a very valid concern. That said, Adobe has been around for well over a decade, and they currently support every RAW format (and provide the RAW plugins) for everything they have ever supported.

TIFF is likely here to stay, but not my favorite format as it's rather huge, and 8 bit (maybe that is or has changed). JPG's have and will be around for a long time, but that is a compressed format.

The new adobe RAW maybe the way to go, but who can see into the future. Most professional imaging people suggest that IF/WHEN you format is looking like it will not longer be supported, move it to a new format. That is likely easier said then done however.

 

[Peter_C]

I keep a 200gig mirrored with another 200gig. The chances of loosing both are pretty slim, and then in case of theft or fire I do have some of my most memorable photos on a dvd at my folks house. Do not trust a computer to safely store your pictures. Hard drives fail all the time.

 

[Diver Dennis]

Just a thought. Would CDs or DVDs that have been vacuum packaged and stored in a dark place, ie: safety deposit box, tend to degrade?