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I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos.

I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat, but they don’t know it yet. The best way to save photos is to print them out. There is no guarantee that digitally stored files will be readable in the future, as I have found from sad peraonal experience.

On the other hand, we don’t have a long track record on photos printed by ink jet printers. Will they still be of good quality 20 years from now? It may be that 20 years from now, we will wish we still had Kodachrome. We know that pictures taken using that technology will last.

I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos.

The lesson here is that redundancy is key. 1TB USB hard disk drives are under $75 nowadays, and you can easily store all of your CD media on a disk that size with plenty of room to spare.

Hard disk drives have MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) ratings measured up to 10 years, and if you keep on top of it, you can continue to migrate those pictures to newer disks in the future.

That being said, I agree that printed pictures are more valuable. Sad that Kodachrome is going the way of the dodo, but the writing was on the wall a while ago. I developed my last roll of film back in the late 90s and have been digital ever since.

RIP old reliable.

With digital you need to follow the 3, 2, 1 rule for archiving.

Three copies on two different types of medium, with one copy stored off site. I go a little beyond and keep one copy on an external hard disk, then use two different brands and types of DVDs, finally back up the important photos using Jungledisk to web storage on Amazon’s S3 service.

I also have many photos printed on real photo paper, rather than use ink jets. Most Walgreens have Fuji Frontier photo processing machines that will take jpegs and make real prints that look great.

Epson Doth allege that prints printed on their photo printers with Epson ink and stored properly are good for 20 years, I have some 5 year old prints that look fine.
Ah! I will miss the “ Nice Bright Color”, but they took it away anyway. My Nikon F2, being totally Manual still works fine. I bought it used in 1983 with 35mm, 50mm, 55mm. semi micro, and 105mm Portrait lenses with a 2x doubler for a grand. No Zoom lenses for me. Do I still use this wonderful equipment? From time to time, just to keep my hand in. I almost bought a Nikon F1 in a shop in Bangkok, but misspent my money foolishly.
BTW all my electronic equipment is defunct Both Nikons and Canon.

I heard about CD rot about a decade ago. Luckily, I transferred everything to a hard drive, I now have my pictures saved 3 times on 3 hard drives, the newest being purchased 1 year ago, I figure if I buy a new hard drive every 5 years or so, retiring the oldest drive as I go, I hava a shot of keeping my photos.

[I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad,]

I rotate my backups onto portable hard disk drives. With 2TB drives presently <$90 it’s cheaper than using writable DVD’s and a whole lot faster too.

Haven’t lost an image since going digital in 2002.

I have told people for years not to do what you did.

What is worse? Putting all the photos on CD’s & then DESTROYING all the originals.

Beyond stupid.

I have photos of my father- who would have been 102 this year & his father, etc, which are priceless to me.

i would NEVER destroy them, even if I did spend the time to put them on CD’s.

When people realize that their wedding photos & first born kid photos are deteriorating, they will be very angry.,

I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos. I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat, but they don’t know it yet. The best way to save photos is to print them out. There is no guarantee that digitally stored files will be readable in the future, as I have found from sad peraonal experience. On the other hand, we don’t have a long track record on photos printed by ink jet printers. Will they still be of good quality 20 years from now? It may be that 20 years from now, we will wish we still had Kodachrome. We know that pictures taken using that technology will last.

I have also lost many years of digital photos too. The ones from earlier on that were taken with a film camera are still around. I have a feeling that because we are in a digital age, knowledge and history will lost because the data will be corrupt or become unreadable. The end of the motion picture Escape from LA comes to mind.

I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad, and the computer can no longer read the files, so I have lost several years worth of photos.

I still have CDs that are as old as the technology that read fine. I have other newer CDs that are unreadable because I didn't take proper care of them. If printed photos are treated the way some people treat their CDs they would not last long either.

I also have all my photo files existing on my computer, on a backup disk and on my pocket drive. Each time my operating system is updated, I ensure fresh copies are made.