[Dr. Zzyzx]

Ahhh, this soothes some of my angst about not owning a digital camera yet.

[AFPhys]

The most permanent solution for this problem is to print out a hex or octal dump of every single file you are keeping, and a rosetta stone file as to how to decipher the dumps, and keep that stack of paper in a nice, dry, fireproof storage safe. There you go... that will assure that archivists a thousand years from now will be able to look at your photos and other documents.

(I wonder how many trees and iron ore mines I would have to kill)

[WilliamWallace1999]

Here is a real life solution (I hope). Basic home networks can now be set up with routers from Wal-mart. A wireless G network can now be created for less than $125. I migrated all the important files from the old machine to the new one at 54 Mbps. Now we run the two systems as backups of each other. I too don't trust digital media, but with this system, I can keep the data alive. Also, Wal-mart has free software to print pictures at the local store right from your home computer. Did the digital print at home thing, what a disaster. Now I get Fuji paper and ink and can pick them up at my convenience. One hour photos without the trip to drop stuff off. Too Cool.

[CDHart]

I have pictures of my grandparents that date back to around 1900 and some perhaps older than that. I don't think CD's are going to last that long, and even if they do, there might not be anything to retrieve the info that's on them. When my daughter was little, my brother taped her talking into a tape recorder; try to find a reel-to-reel tape player anymore. Also my daughter's wedding was videotaped, and it's getting harder to find VCRs now. I think I'll stick with the conventional camera.

Carolyn

[Billthedrill]

Data migration hits the mainstream. This conversation would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, but then so would the medium it's being conducted on. Food for cyber-philosophers.

You see it in the nuts and bolts of historiography - Clarke's Law is correct, "85% of everything is crap." Problem is that to the people living it which 85% it is, is impossible to know. My family had some bundles of Civil War letters way back when, and an unnamed cousin thought she'd conserve space and save the important stuff by steaming the stamps off and tossing those gossipy handwritten pages. I could cry.

The critical thing is file format; the rest is only 0's and 1's, and as long as you can stay no more than two or three generations back in terms of media you'll be fine. Once they hit a large hard drive somewhere it's somebody else's problem (mine, actually) and the user's problem becomes keeping track of it. Fortunately the days of weird and exotic file formats are receding just as the days of weird and exotic starting mechanisms did in antique automobiles. The inertia afforded by the World Wide Web and a user community that has grown exponentially will see to that. JPG's are going to be around for awhile and when they aren't somebody is going to make a real nice living converting them. That's one nice thing about digital media - it's a lot easier converting TIF files to JPG than it is sitting in a damp graveyard rubbing tombstones or trying to photograph the insides of Egyptian tombs without destroying their contents. Healthier, too.

And, getting back to the 85% rule, not everything should be saved, and it isn't really up to us. "All those moments lost in time, like tears in the rain."

[Glenn]

Nikon D70. Should I or souldn't I?

[TexasRepublic]

There are several types of storage media that might be more suitable for archiving than dye-based CD's and DVD's: phase-change (DVD-RAM) and Magneto-Optical (MO drives). I use both. These are not mainstream products, but they are available. I would welcome anyone's opinions on these technologies.

[Thud]

I'm having new prints made of old family photos, after scanning them. My father died recently and I inherited the various family albums. I've scanned them and will have new prints made for my brothers and I, as well as distributing the digitized scans. 500 old photos x 3 brothers x @20 cents a copy isn't bad - maybe $300 for printing plus the $250 scanner (Epson 4180).

I'll start scanning all the photos I took of my wife and our children before we got a digital camera. Safe long-term storage will always be a problem, but at least now I can have off-site backups of the original photos, which I couldn't do before unless I reprinted the photos (expen$ive).

[valkyrieanne]

People need to print their favorite photos on acid-free paper and store them in an acid-free paper album - just like in the good old days. Ditto for any written material one wants to preserve. You have to print it out on acid-free paper. Don't know how long the printers' ink will last, though.

[SlowBoat407]

Yeah, bring the older, more permanent media, like film (early ones ignite spontaneously), paper photo prints (faded, crumbling, flammable), vinyl (scratches, dust, warping), tape (media flakes off, brittleness, wear).

Let's face it: the only way to make sure something is going to last for the ages is to engrave it in clay and then fire the clay.

Or embed it in a fruitcake.

[ctdonath2]

The great irony of the Information Age: in 100 years, nothing from now will be remembered.

[ThePythonicCow]

Copy the entire disk forward. I've got stuff on my current computer dating back to the mid 1980's.

Disks have been growing fast enough that I just copy the _entire_ contents of the old disk into a subdirectory of my new one, when I upgrade. I've owned disks of sizes (in Megabytes, guesstimating) 5, 10, 20, 40, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3000, 6000, 15000, 30000, and 80000. And that 80 Gb drive is looking pretty small compared to what's out there today.

Don't expect to use offline media as archival storage. Keep it all online, and all backed up. When a new backup media comes into vogue, throw out the old ones once you have a few good generations of new backups. Removable IDE drives are currently the most cost effective backup media - lower cost per bit than tapes, and easier to work with.

[BlueMondaySkipper]

This one is easy...

Just post all your important stuff on the internet in the form of jokes. These never seem to go away.

It's kind of like painting cement. If you properly prep the surface and get two good coats down, you can expect it to stick for a couple of years. If, however, you spill some of the very same paint on some concrete, it's there FOREVER

[k2blader]

Bookmarked.

[perfect stranger]

"If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get it to boot up," he said."

Somebody should tell this guy about extention cords and powerstrips. He must've been sick that day. LOL

[Blue Highway]

"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable, you'll be able to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient computer available," said Schwartz.

That's a comforting thought that some place will keep an Atari 800 machine running, with an 810 disk drive so I can move over all my 5 1/4" disks to DVD's. Now I can sleep at night.

[BJungNan]

I have already run into this problem. We have discs with my daughter's artwork on it. But, it is in a file format that we can not open on our new computers.

[Blue Highway]

I believe all the answers to this conundrum can be found at Zombo.com

[Godebert]

Bump for future reference.

[derlauerer]

Bump so I can find this again.