How hard is it to burn images to a CD for crying out loud?
How long to CDs last?
> How hard is it to burn images to a CD for crying out loud?
Not hard at all, but do they last?
I have Kodak PhotoCDs from the 1990s that are already
unreadable, despite ideal handling & storage.
You can buy this stuff:
http://store.mam-a-store.com/standard---archive-gold.html
but even so, unless you have a stewardship process in
place, verifying or re-copying them every few years,
there is substantial risk of loss.
And bargain-brand CDR media is entirely unreliable,
esp. the Russian-made junk.
It's not just the issue of burning images to a disk. It's being able to find software to view the images. As a professional photographer, I can tell you that there are already problems associated with viewing some of the first digital images I captured six years ago.
You missed the point of the article. It is about how to read that CD 20 years from now.
For example, do you have any old databases on 5 1/4 inch floppies?
In case you have not noticed, technology changes.
I would bet the house on the fact that CD's as we know them today will not exist in 100 years.
Even if that was not the case, even CDs can be damaged, and all the data on them lost.
Preserving information is nothing new. It is funny that books printed several hundred years ago are in some cases in better shape then book printed in the last century (has something to do with the acid in the paper).
Important information will be preserved (at a great cost) but for the average individual, many memories that are being faithfully stored on computer hard drives and on CDs will simply fade away.
Again, this is not a new problem, think of Egypt. The records of a whole civilization was lost for thousands of years because no one could "read" the database (hieroglyphs)
They curved their history into stone, and yet it was lost for a very long time. We store our history as magnetic bits, where too much heat, or a strong magnetic field can wipe it all out.
My advise, if you have important information (and photographs) put them on paper. It will have a better chance of surviving the next hundred years.