Stan Fayer

In a Hundred years from now will there be a means of reading those floppy discs , CD’s , DVD’s, flash drives, or even the cloud. But you can still look at a negative, a photograph, a painting ,or a sculpture.

DaveyDitzer Loc: Western PA

[quote=exposeu]

"People are taking more pictures now than ever before, billions of them, but there are no slides, no prints. Just data. Electronic dust. Years from now when they dig us up there won't be any pictures to find, no record of who we were or how we lived."

Except my occasional Tri X prints and negs.

chrisg-optical Loc: New York, NY

Me too, but realize no media that we know of can last tens of thousands of years, except that written in stone, and eventually those will erode away too - it's a question of when not if. Ask yourself, suppose I want people 10,000 or 100,000 years to see the images I have taken? Anything printed on paper, unless it's stored in a controlled environment, and it's kept controlled, will eventually disintegrate. Metals oxidize and degrade too, as with very old coins. Film, slides or negatives, will eventually rot and turn acidic. All current digital media has limited lifespans, whether it's flash, SSD, CDs, DVD, BD, M-DISC, hard drives (even in a RAID),tape (LTO tapes up to 30 years), etc. The other problem with any type of media, digital or analog, is the availability of a device to read it. Eventually electronics will fail too. At the very least, flash memory used in processors and local storage will degrade too. (Old home computers from the 1970s for example, need to have their EPROMs refreshed or replaced.) The best we can do is preserve digital media via generational copies on the most reliable media we have. This is the strategy used by many large media and entertainment companies with LTO tape - upgrading the drives and tapes every 2-3 generations, as well as diversifying on multiple types of media such a proprietary disc formats.

Until a super durable medium is invented (>200-1000 years), the generation copy system is all we have. Holographic storage media with ECC may be on the horizon someday, promising super dense and super reliable storage. Again, the device to read it must be as reliable and durable too.

DaveyDitzer Loc: Western PA

I do have B/W prints that are about 100 yrs old that my dad made. Granted, it's not millennia, but a century is a good start.

BebuLamar

If someone interested in your images there will be. It's not hard to construct devices to read them.

revhen Loc: By the beautiful Hudson

I have boxes and boxes of beautiful slides, especially Kodachrome taken from the 1960s to the early 2000s then tens of thousands of digital pictures taken for the last 20+ years. None will last except for the very few I have shared with others or put into pictures on my walls. Bummer - or just the way it is.

MJPerini

Lots of pessimistic views today.....
We all produce and accumulate lots of 'junk', it is not entirely a bad thing for lots of it to turn to dust.
But we also produce some good stuff , stuff worth remembering. If we are selective it is not difficult to preserve our best stuff.
We get in trouble when we think that we need to save EVERYTHING.
A good place to start is making archival prints of our best work - things our family will value. Lots of prints can fit in a couple of archival calm shell boxes---- especially if we edit honestly.

DaveyDitzer Loc: Western PA

User ID

When CPO corrected me I just assumed that although "sherds" was a "dictionary synonym" that the specialty of archaeology had adopted "sherds" in some past time when it was in common use, and so their professional jargon was "pot sherds". Since inside baseball lingo doesnt change even if over time "shards" displaces "sherds" in broader general usage, then "pot SHERDS" are what we should be producing to transmit our existence to future archaeologists if we want to be recognized as a significant "civilization".

Why are american trains driven by "engineers" who do not design or even maintain their locomotives ? Brits call those same operators "engine drivers".

I have a Master of Library Science and so, per our training, Im more than willing to use "sherds" if the patron is wearing a pith helmet and desert boots ;-)

I encountered a seemingly authoritative explanation that "aluminum" is a fairly recent commercial term, and that "aluminium" is the original and still proper name for that metal. Kinda like jello and gelatin or kleenex and tissue. (Dont bother to point out that gelatin and tissue describe broader ranges of products.)

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

You are wise beyond your years, Longshadow!

Cany143 Loc: SE Utah

That's twice in a row that you've (finally!) been right about something. OMFG!!!

Turning over a 'new' sorta leaf, Cheepftster???

OldCADuser Loc: Irvine, CA

Along these lines is an interesting article from the Smithsonian Institute:

https://siarchives.si.edu/what-we-do/digital-curation/digital-preservation-challenges-and-solutions

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Yea... I have a ton of .doc and.xls files. The new format is .docx and .xlsx. They're slowly getting converted.

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

I didn't know anyone was keeping an eye on me that closely. I would have tried a little harder, had I known!
Thanks, Cany!

Turning over leaves is a much over valued pastime! Unless you're looking for food!

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

I wasn't my intention to correct you, User ID. Just to share some of my wide and deep knowledge base!