Have you thought about how you are going to save your digital photos and videos so that they are still accessible 50+ years from now?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ng-forever Seeing Forever: Storing Bits Isn't the Same as Preserving Them, by David Pogue
Digital photos and videos are great, but don't expect your grandkids to see them
By David Pogue | April 7, 2011
What photos does anybody print these days? Only a few special ones. We view the vast majority of digital photos on screens. That’s convenient, they look great, and they’re often much bigger than 4 × 6 prints. But will they be viewable in 50 years, let alone 150? That would be assuming a lot. For one thing, it would assume that the JPEG format used by most digital photo files will still be around in 150 years. JPEG has a fighting chance, because there are so many billions of photo files, but it’s not a sure thing. No computer format has been around for even 50 years.
The situation is even more grim when it comes to less mainstream files. Preserving video, for example, is going to be a nightmare. In the short history of digital camcorders, we’ve already accumulated a vast array of file types—MPEG-2, AVCHD, MiniDV, .MOV, .AVI, and so on—and that’s not even counting the millions of dying tape formats they’re stored on. What are the odds of these videos being playable in 50 years, let alone 100? Already the current version of Microsoft Word can’t open some documents from the first versions of the program. Do we really expect to be able to play AVCHD videos in 100 years?
Whenever I write about format loss and data rot, a few enterprising companies always pipe up. “We’ve got a new Web site called EverStore—we’ll store your digital files forever!” This is hilarious, considering that the Web as we know it isn’t even 20 years old. Not a single online-storage company has been around for more than 10 years—and several have already gone out of business, including big-name services such as AOL’s Xdrive. If you really think that the EverStores of today will keep your files safe for your grandchildren, well, here’s a brochure for my Brooklyn Bridge Investment Trust.
In other words, in the rush to record humanity’s stories in digital formats, it doesn’t seem as though we are giving equal thought to how we are going to preserve them. Nobody is going to stumble across the photos on your hard drive in 2061, that’s for sure. (What hard drive have you owned for even 10 years?) If, indeed, we care about sending our recordings into the next century, we’ll have to tend them like a garden.
The next step is to make a commitment: that you will revisit your recordings every 10 years. If your digital files are to reach your great-grandchildren, somebody, or generations of somebodies, will have to copy them from one hard drive to the next and from there onto solid-state drives, then to nanotubes, then to brain implants—whatever the latest storage medium happens to be. And it’s not just the storage medium that will change; the file formats will have to be migrated, too.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
