Do you worry about 'bit rot'

CNN Money quoted Google VP Vint Cerf recently, saying: "In our zeal to get excited about digitising, we digitise photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong."

How o you prepare your digital legacy for posterity?

We can't. We can only make our images active whilst we are active. Afterwards, everything falls into disrepair and it will need our offspring to preserve a sample of our work.

Joining in a wide variety of websites can help, but in the end all is soon forgotten.

There seems to be agreement that images and documents printed onto good archive-quality paper will remain accessible for a century or longer.

Nevertheless, there is an awareness of a need to keep digitised material accessible. DSpace is one such approach: an archive system built with the intention that metadata will always be updated to remain accessible via whatever software is current in the future. It was developed by MIT and Hewlett Packard early this century and is open-source and being adopted by several academic organisations. You may be able to archive your stuff to one of these if you have some valid connection. For more information see Wikipedia and the DSpace website.

Martin

I suspect that the only images of mine that will be of interest to future generations will be family photographs, particularly the informal ones. These are, of course, the least likely to be printed. All of the carefully lit and artfully composed stuff is unlikely to hold interest in the long term.

My son in law is from a theatrical family and has a number of beautifully produced old publicity stills of his parents and grandparents by some of the top photographers of the day. Very pretty but only really of interest to film and theatre buffs. Of much greater interest are the informal family shots that invoke real memories.

I started with digital cameras around 2002 but had been scanning prints for some time.

For both my now grown up children I created printed albums of their first 21 years as presents along with discs of the images.

My father in law after nagging did scans of all the old family albums he had and I'm still acquiring my late Dad's pics although again what I have I share with siblings to broaden the chance that some one has a record for future generations.

The amount of media devices hard to read now is alarming though, Amiga & MS DOS floppy discs, Jaz drives, Video tapes, mini disc , cassettes etc. I've also talked to archivist friends at the likes of the National Gallery very alarmed that dependence on digital is dangerous.

I can understand their concern but there's such a huge amount of data being generated these days that it would be impractical to make hard copies of it all

I believe that archiving all content in digital format is today the safest way to ensure it is preserved. If all pictures and videos are saved in a standard format, it should be easy to convert them when formats and archiving methods will change.

I recently copied all my digital and analog video tapes and it was lengthy but straightforward. I am still in the process of digitizing all my negatives and dias, though.

Our local museum say they archive all digital media on GOLD CD's.

I checked these out and found several makes that are advertised as having a life of 100 to 200 years !

What is more, they are not really that much more expensive to buy (I use SVP)

Apparently standard CD's use aluminium which corrodes eventually which is why they fail. However gold, well, gold is gold and doesn't corrode !

I won't be around to test the makers claims but it seems worth a try ?

Peter

It's OK having the argument that hard copies of images might last longer than digital, but it's important to remember that hard copy prints, or negatives deteriorate with age. dyes degrade unevenly, fungus can appear on negs, etc, etc

The advantage of digital storage is that while specific mediums might not last forever, if you are diligent to maintain the archive, when you copy the material onto newer storage devices there's no degradation in the copy.

So in answer to ...


... then you need to make arrangements for your descendants or interested parties to maintain your media into the future after your demise.

Ultimately though everything comes to an end, but it's noble that we do try and fight against that however futile

Maybe we'll be re-discovered in far distant futures that we can only speculate upon. In the meantime, archivally processed darkroom prints have the potential to last many hundreds of years, and don't need any electronics to read them. Film may be the best way to go for truly archival "permanence" - all digital media rely upon our ability to read the files.

Here's a bit of The Baby, the first computer:


and things have moved on a bit. Apparently it had enough memory to remember 22 words. Floppy discs are later, and I think even now few of us will have means to read standard "A" drive floppies, never mind their 5 1/4" predecessors.

It's a case in point, because I have lots of floppy discs, plus a USB "A" drive to read them with. How often do I look at them? Never. In the future, they will be thrown out by someone and the contents lost forever.

In contrast, the case of old family photos from the 1850s onwards will still be there, under the spare bed. How often do we look at those? Maybe a few times a year, and they are enjoyed by all the generations of the family.

I do agree with John's post. The number of people I know who use their mobile phones to take pictures, then either lose it, damage it and not bother to print.

I was in conversation with someone in the trade, and they felt that film will be here for many years, unfortunately the processing labs probably won't be and perhaps neither will the film and chemicals for home processing. Monochrome film is so expensive these days, manufacturers in a sorry decline.

I don't use film now, digital is cleaner, (probably healthier when you think about selenium toner and other chemicals used in the darkroom), quicker to post process (somehow removing that annoying dust spot using 'ink' and an extremely fine brush, doesn't appeal to me anymore).

Regards Malcombe

The jpeg and DNG file types have proved durable and long term, certainly outlasting some of the digital storage media that have been mentioned, and equipment to 'run' and' read' them shows no sign of becoming obsolete ...I mean every new generation of computer can still deal with these file types and there's no backwards compatability issues are there?

So the only job really is to keep your backups up to date, and ensure that anything on storage devices that are reaching the end of their lifecycle are copied across to newer types ... So far USB hard drives, DVDs and Blu-ray discs are proving to have ongoing availability and updating and show no sign of phasing out. There seems for now to always be a newer model of the hardware to buy and the discs are easily obtained. I try and reburn my DVDs every few years.

Once we're gone then there's far greater likelihood that time will pass and someone will miss an opportunity to copy the material into newer formats and newer storage technologies, and our carefully maintained DVD and hard drive archives will end up in a skip somewhere.

There's not just the question of the survival of the media and files, there's the issue of compatibility. Even jpegs will eventually be replaced and we may not be able to open even well-preserved files.

Yes, but my point really was that this is not happening, and shows no sign of happening. Jpegs and Tiffs and DNGs seem remarkably long-lived, and there are not replacements or alternatives coming along. And we seem to be retaining full backwards compatability .... Windows 10 will be able to open a jpeg created 20 years ago .....

I started with digital photography in 2001 with a Fuji mx1300 which had 1.3 megapixel. The photos now on my screen look like thumbnails! And this is the problem with digital what may seem good today may not in the future and that's before you get into file types and how they are stored.

I have some of my images backed up on jaz discs. I can't plug a jaz drive into my computer without an expensive adaptor and my jaz discs are only around 10 years old...