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Author Topic: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)  (Read 5158 times)

Der Oak

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Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« on: August 20, 2011, 11:55:53 am »

Hello Everyone,

I was wondering, what you think about a data archiving service I have discovered on the internet. They are called Syylex (www.syylex.de/index.php/home_english.html), and they claim to have patented a way to manufacture optical master discs made of glass for data archiving purposes that are virtually indestructible.

Since harddisks will fail at some point and any current disc media will probably also not last for many years, their proposition sounds kind of interesting. According to their website the data is physically written into a glass disc (like with a commercially printed DVD), but the material is a safety glass that will not change its chemical properties over time. Appearently these discs would be resistant to basically everything (heat, radiation, liquids, mechanical stress etc.). The discs are compatible with all DVD players and similar devices.

If what they say is valid, data archived this way could last for hundreds of years.

The only caveat seems to be the limited storage capacity per disc of about 5Gb. I couldn't find information on pricing. The company appears to be brand-new.

What do you think about this? Do you feel this could be an interesting thing to try out?

Would be happy for your feedback :)!

Cheers
Oak

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alain

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #1 on: August 20, 2011, 02:39:27 pm »

I doubt that you're going  find a new DVD reader in 10-20 years.

I use multiple hard disks that are stored away from the computer and on several locations and I do check those from time to time using MD5 checksums.  It's important that a hard disk is read regular (every year or couple of months) so that it can find deteriorations before those are too difficult to automatic correct.

Because hard disk technology still evolves you get more storage for the same money after time.  A 2TB disk (>400 DVD's) goes now below €60, so it's not expensive to have several of them as backup. 

 
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Ben Rubinstein

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #2 on: August 20, 2011, 03:42:27 pm »

I doubt that you're going  find a new DVD reader in 10-20 years.


Was just about to say...
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louoates

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #3 on: August 20, 2011, 05:27:20 pm »

Quite a deep subject. I believe that the only sure way to preserve images, even in this digital-getting-cheaper age, is with a physical print. Yes, I know that even with today's archival printing you will see deterioration in, take your pick, 50-250 years.

I do quite a lot of work with old studio photography portraits that are now around 100 years old. Would I like to use the original studio negatives rather than my scan of the often-dirty and scratched print? You bet. But those negatives were discarded by the photographer's studio 99 years ago. That was their storage media. All that remains that is useful is that physical print as cruddy as it may be.

Right now I print and frame or stretch most of what I consider my best work. I can reasonably believe that they will be around through my use, the use of my children, and perhaps even my grandchildren until, inevitably, they end up in a flea market or antique store.

All my images are safely(?) stored on multiple 4-Terrabyte hard drives in separate locations including one in my fireproof safe. With today's increasingly rapid pace of development, if I don't keep upgrading those storage devices, and their technology, every five to ten years or so they will degrade as discussed above. Without those transfers the reading devices of the future won't be sufficiently backward-capable after say, 20 years And that's optimistic.

I'd like to think that 100 years from now some guy will like an image of mine enough to fire up his whatever-the-copy-device-of-the-future is and make new print from my print. He probably wouldn't want to paw through a pile of dusty antique hard drives in someone's garage sale to find a nice old image.
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Les Sparks

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #4 on: August 20, 2011, 06:12:59 pm »

Archiving digital information is an unsolved problem. Those of us with gray hair probably have floppy discs, 3 1/4 disks, Zip disk, tape, and who know what else copies of archived digital data. None of which we can recover today. I know of many large companies and government organizations that have millions of dollars of old data that is currently unavailable because of items 2 and 3 below.
Any solution to archiving digital data must ensure that:
1. The data (1s and 0s) are protected and can be read (The OPs technology might do this)
2. Hardware necessary to read the data is available forever (We're  a long way from this)
3. Software necessary to convert the 1s and 0s to photos,  documents,  or whatever  is available forever. (Don't have this now either. Try to  open a WordPerfect 1or  MS Word 1.0 today).

The advise often given for archiving digital data is copy  everything to the latest and greatest hardware  with the most up-to-date software. And  keep doing it as the technology changes. Easy with megabytes of data, not  too hard with a few gigabytes of data,  really  hard with terabytes. I would rather create  new  images than spend my time copying my old images to new backup devices.

Some people claim the cloud will be the answer.  If you bet on the cloud,  you're betting that the company(ies) you  use live  forever. Given the large number of companies that have been really really big and long lived that aren't with us anymore,  this doesn't seem  like a winning bet.

So  as louoates says the physical copy is the current state of the art for archival storage. It's really hard to see that the physical print or document will be replaced as the archival version anytime  soon.
Les
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feppe

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #5 on: August 20, 2011, 07:04:13 pm »

What Les said. Archival of files is not an issue for individuals - it is for companies, governments, libraries and such institutions who have orders of magnitude more data.

The best way is to migrate your files to a new format as they become a standard and cost-efficient: floppies -> tapes -> CDs -> DVDs -> HDDs -> SSDs -> holographic memory -> whatever. Not sure what Les was referring to on time, though: it takes just a few hours to migrate terabytes of data these days.

While you can still find floppy drives, it's questionable if you can read old floppies, or old CDs, etc. Using some proprietary tech as mentioned in the OP will be useless in 100 years (I bet 10) when they're not around and you'd have to reverse engineer how to read their disks. Migrating data also ensures you refresh it to ensure bit rot doesn't eat it away.

For the truly worst-case scenario it would be good to have all your data on a non-magnetic media. Although if there's a nuclear holocaust you'll probably be more concerned about other things than your photo collection.. And the only computers alive would be the ones owned by the military; not too many of those run PS :P

And remember to have duplicate backups, at least one of them off-site to ensure theft/fire/water doesn't destroy everything.

Gary Brown

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #6 on: August 20, 2011, 07:31:12 pm »

I believe that the only sure way to preserve images, even in this digital-getting-cheaper age, is with a physical print.

Here's a press release on that subject (aimed at consumers, not directly relevant for people on this forum, but nevertheless interesting): InfoTrends Advocates Educating Consumers on Benefits of Using Multiple Photo Storage and Archival Methods:

“According to InfoTrends’ latest Western European end-user research, over 40% of consumers have lost some or all of their photos. Many respondents indicated that their most favoured photo recovery solutions are back-ups stored on an external hard drive or on CD/DVDs. While these are not bad options, there is one part of the preservation equation that is often being overlooked: photo prints.”
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PeterAit

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #7 on: August 20, 2011, 07:52:04 pm »

I can't help but wonder why I, or anyone else, would give a fiddler's fart about my photos in 100 years.
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RSL

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #8 on: August 20, 2011, 08:08:01 pm »

Hear, hear, Peter. Neither can I.
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louoates

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #9 on: August 20, 2011, 10:12:48 pm »

The 100 year or 250 year archival benchmarks were, in my opinion, created more to measure the rapid improvements in longevity of ink jet printing. As most of you recall, the real knock against digital printing via ink jet say, 4 or 5 years ago, was the really rapid deterioration of images. You could see radical shifts of color and fading after a few months. I saw serious degrading in a few weeks in direct Arizona sun. So the mega year archival tests served a valuable purpose in the minds of art show customers as well as folks like me who were considering buying a large format ink jet printer.

Most of my sales are by galleries selling in the middle cost range. For example, one gallery sells my 18" x 64" canvases for $495. I am comfortable with that price because I know that they will get a reasonable amount of usage and value from that item with zero risk they will ever see degradation. Four or five years ago I would NEVER sell that item at any price due to its extremely short life. And most galleries would never touch an ink jet print for the same reason.

So it's not so much that I worry about my priceless prints not surviving 100+ years. It's more about me being satisfied that the value is there for my customers.

A related thought about long term storage of images not printed:

If I lost all my existing digital image files except for about 100 of my best repeat gallery sellers, 100 of my best non-commercial images,  and 100 various family photos I wouldn't really have lost all that much.

I have roughly 25,000 images in storage that I have evaluated but never worked with let alone printed. I often scan many folders looking for bits and pieces of images for my various composite work. Of those I will probably review maybe 1,000 an I may end up working with 100 of those. I suspect that most photographers will never view 90% of their work after the first month.
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Der Oak

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #10 on: August 21, 2011, 05:09:17 am »

Thank you for your interesting replies :)!

Yes, I guess the topic is a tough one, since only the fewest of us have proven future-telling skills. From what I read from your replies, there appear to be 2 states-of-the-art right now:

1) Always copying the files to newest harddisks (or SSDs or similar devices) in multiple copies and storing them at different locations.

2) Printing the best images and rely on the longevity of the prints.

I guess the printing method would demand multiple copies of prints as well (not thinking about sold artwork now, but also private snapshot of undefinable emotional value). It would have the great benefit of not needing whatever-kind-of device in the future to read the "data". But it may be less than optimal if one really wanted to have backups of tens of thousands of files.

Thinking about it, an analog medium most probably actually is one of the more secure options. I'm thinking about governments that store documents etc. on microfilm in nuclear-war-proof bunkers. The beauty of this method is that microfilm could easily be accessed even in the far future. You just need some way to magnify, and that shouldn't be too hard to "re-invent", if necessary.

So, why not having a service that would print your RAW image onto a new kind of transparency film at let's say medium format size (for resolution's sake). Naively I would think that it cannot be impossible to create a future film material that could even have EXIF data embedded (maybe as micro text information on the side or so).

If there were a service that would write your digital image-date losslessly onto film, it could be easily and properly stored and recovered in the future.

Provided that in 200 years anyone would actually still have some interest in those files...

Thanks for the discussion so far
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alain

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #11 on: August 21, 2011, 01:12:24 pm »

...
Yes, I guess the topic is a tough one, since only the fewest of us have proven future-telling skills. From what I read from your replies, there appear to be 2 states-of-the-art right now:

1) Always copying the files to newest harddisks (or SSDs or similar devices) in multiple copies and storing them at different locations.

2) Printing the best images and rely on the longevity of the prints.

...

The two options serve other purposes :

1) Avoiding that you lose images (or you're company if working professional).   You will try to keep all you're images and are probably willing to take some time for it.

2) To keep you're images around for the longest time after you're gone.   This will only be you're most important.  It important to know that it's important that the new owners (childeren, grandchildren,...) probably won't take much effort to keep them and some will simply destroy them

A very nice podcast about it from Brooks Jensen :

http://www.lenswork.com/podcast/LW0340%20-%20Family%20Photos%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age.mp3
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Justan

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #12 on: August 23, 2011, 10:41:29 am »

> Archiving digital information is an unsolved problem. Those of us with gray hair probably have floppy discs, 3 1/4 disks, Zip disk, tape, and who know what else copies of archived digital data. None of which we can recover today.

I remember reading that old floppy disks lose the image after a short while. This is not necessarily true! I recently did a project for a group where we bought a few computers from a computer recycler that had 5.25” and 3.5” floppy drives (they ran Windows 3.11(!)) and in a large number of trials (numbering in the thousands) we were able to completely recover content (some of which were 360 kb and 720 kb disks) that dated back to the early 1980s. Only had problems with a few disks and even these were recoverable. This is in the very humid Seattle area.

Part of the project was to connect the recovery machines to a LAN and even that was very doable. The biggest problem was that Windows 3.x machines don’t get along with current generation of servers and workstations. We needed to connect the computers to a server to transfer the recovered data. The work around was to put PC Anywhere on the workstations and use that to connect to the server. PC Anywhere has a file transfer program that works great for this.

Anywho, one can recover data from old floppy drives and I suspect also tape drives. I also occasionally use a reel to reel tape which has music I recorded back in the 70’s and these too still work fine.

That said, as others have indicated, store the data on at least 3 different media sets, preferably hard drives, check them periodically to make sure they work, and replace the drives every 3 years or so.

RSL

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #13 on: August 23, 2011, 11:13:49 am »

From what I've read it looks as if currently the expected life of a good CD is about 70 years, somewhat less for a DVD. But at the rate technology is changing, long before 70 years are up we're likely to have storage devices that'll be good for 700 years, or 7,000. If my descendents are willing to transfer my files to newer storage devices, fine. If not, I'm sure it isn't going to bother me.

On the other hand, when I make a print for sale, it's printed, mounted, and matted in a way that should let it survive for a couple hundred years if properly handled and displayed, but that's a different kind of thing.
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louoates

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #14 on: August 23, 2011, 11:43:04 am »

The ultimate solution I came up with is this:
   Assemble all my framed work, all my digital file storage devices containing every image I ever made, plus my best-ever golf scorecard, place them all into a stainless steel capsule, crawl in after them, and have the lot flash-frozen to -196 degrees C.
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RSL

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #15 on: August 23, 2011, 12:52:09 pm »

Lou, Afraid you'd end up with a terribly cold personality.
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feppe

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #16 on: August 23, 2011, 02:37:44 pm »

From what I've read it looks as if currently the expected life of a good CD is about 70 years, somewhat less for a DVD.

I believe 70 years is for pre-recorded audio CDs. CD-Rs have a much shorter lifespan; I've heard 10 years quoted and that's what Wikipedia says as well.

PierreVandevenne

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #17 on: August 23, 2011, 03:14:49 pm »

I've been keeping all my stuff since 1980 (including my zx 81 Z80code) - constant migration to newer storage media over the years, although I seem to have settled to NAS + backup for the last few years. Still have the old hardware as well and can still read cassette tapes or 180K floppies if needed. The only media I've had significant issues with are CD-Rs and assimilated standards. Some of them were showing signs of decay after 2-3 years. Come to think of it, I can't read my TI-59 magnetic strips anymore, but that hardly matters.

The major stumbling block is actually my memory - while I have everything, in many case I can't find it at once.
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RSL

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #18 on: August 23, 2011, 05:38:53 pm »

I believe 70 years is for pre-recorded audio CDs. CD-Rs have a much shorter lifespan; I've heard 10 years quoted and that's what Wikipedia says as well.

Feppe, Sometimes Wikipedia can be helpful, but it's also loaded with all sorts of misinformation. Check http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/opticalmedialongevity.html, a research outfit that gives a range of 50-200 years for properly stored CD-Rs, and 30-100 for properly stored DVD±Rs. This particular estimate comes from the Optical Storage Technology Association (q.v.) But as they point out, no one really knows. Estimates are based on accelerated life testing which is interpreted in an unclear manner. This reference also points out that there's no such thing as certified, archival-quality optical media, Delkin Devices to the contrary notwithstanding.

There's some pretty good poop on CD and DVD archiving at http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/disccare.html. One thing people often overlook is that you should store them vertically, not horizontally.

I have some CDs from the time when recordable CDs first came out that are still in good shape. I've also had a few failures of a couple of the early cheapies. Fortunately I learned early on during my days as a software engineer not to rely on single backups.

I'll still go with 70 years as a fair guess.
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feppe

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Re: Forever-lasting way of archiving files (or anything else)
« Reply #19 on: August 23, 2011, 05:53:58 pm »

I have some CDs from the time when recordable CDs first came out that are still in good shape. I've also had a few failures of a couple of the early cheapies. Fortunately I learned early on during my days as a software engineer not to rely on single backups.

I'll still go with 70 years as a fair guess.

That doesn't add up.

I've had several CD-R failures in less than 5 years of usage. If I was using CD-Rs for backup I'd give them 5-10 years.
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