A reawakening to film?

Paul Verizzo · Apr 27, 2015

Spot on, polyglot

polyglot said:
Eh, maybe. Most people don't understand how to preserve anything, digital or analogue. If you can say "but my toned FB prints will live for a millennium!", you're in the vanishingly small minority of people who know what they're doing.

Digital has likewise got a few people who know what they're doing. People who use RAID and offsite backups and actually make use of the fact that you can make an infinite number of lossless generations of copies - their photos will last as well as any FB print, will never be stolen or lost in a fire or flood. As the web gets more prominent in people's lives, I suspect that there's a lot of history that will live on in flickr and similar sites and while having that stuff held by a private corporation is a bad, bad idea, there are more open, distributed and fail-safe solutions starting to take shape, at least in universities.

Can you guess my PhD had something to do with distributed filesystems? My prediction is that within a decade or so, what people refer to as "cloud" or "grid" computing will start to become more of a reality than the buzzword that it is now and reliable long-term archival of data will become available to the general public. Photos will probably be one of the first things to go on there.

At the moment though, Joe-six-pack with the one copy of his photos on one hard drive or CD-ROM? They'll be lost irretrievably soon, just like C-41 negs and Ektacolor prints.

After all the fiascos over the last century with film based images like vinegared acetate negatives and film, the early post WWII Ektacolor fiaso, the short life (usually, but not always) of color prints, it's pretty adacious to claim that film has a longer life. And that's before we talk about accidents.

When I've taught a class in archiving your family's photo heritage, I show a ziplock of blackened prints and slides in various degrees of damage. Some of the survivor's from my 1988 garage fire.

OTOH, I've thousands of family images back into the late 19th century. www.vphotoestate.com Man, ya gottoa love those 4x5" 1940's Kodachromes!

I also tried to teach my students what you are suggesting: "Backup, backup, backup." I have a second hard drive that I update every week or two, I have Crash Plan off in the cloud, and I keep a full monthly backup hard drive in my car. If my house burned down (see above garage fire experience), everything is accessible in my car's trunk and the latest of anything I can pull off of Crash Plan. And, oh darn, my thousands of historical prints will be ash...........but they've been scanned and are on my backups.

Digital has the ability to far outlive any analog source. If the nuclear radiation wave zaps all of our hard drives into oblivion, well, you aren't going to be worrying much about your prints.

Paul Verizzo · Apr 27, 2015

Morry Katz said:
Thanks for the link, Murray. It's an excellent article. Digital has two major flaws: the degradation of the storage media and the obsolescence of the retrieval equipment. Old negatives print easily.
Morry Katz - Lethbridge Canada

What degradation of the storage media? Hard and solid state drives are a lot less prone to "degradation" than paper in many cases.

Just like my 78 RPM's, and LP's, there will be equipment around for a long, long time. True, can't find anything on eBay to play my Edison wax tubes............

Worst case, print your best images!

ME Super · Apr 27, 2015

If we're talking about digital information, Paul has it right - backup, backup, backup. The second thing I'd say is automate, automate, automate your backups. The average user won't want to take the time to burn a CD or manually issue a command (or drag-and-drop) the latest files over to a secondary hard drive. But if you give them the tools and they can automate the job, then it's a fire-and-forget scenario. They'll be fairly comfortable in the knowledge that their precious information has been backed up automatically, whether it's to a second (or third) hard drive, or to the cloud.

Ko.Fe. · Apr 27, 2015

Paul Verizzo said:
What degradation of the storage media? Hard and solid state drives are a lot less prone to "degradation" than paper in many cases.

Just like my 78 RPM's, and LP's, there will be equipment around for a long, long time. True, can't find anything on eBay to play my Edison wax tubes............

Worst case, print your best images!

It is peripheral, connectors and OS. Where are twenty years old HDD. Where do you connect them now?
Go to antique mall and have a look at 100+ years old pictures before talking about paper degradation. I can't print it is so good now .

nworth · Apr 28, 2015

Negatives and transparencies can be destroyed by mold, rot, neglect, physical damage, aging, and chemical attacks. Digital photos can be lost to erasure, physical damage, aging changes, and obsolescence. At least you can see the process with negatives.

I have a recent horror story. Several months ago my photo computer's motherboard failed. For some reason, after I replaced it, the computer destroyed the boot sector and partition table on the RAID drive containing my photos. I have backups on over 1000 DVDs (almost all of them still readable), and I have the negatives for about 70 percent of the photos. This is not a huge stash for someone who has been taking pictures for a while. But restoring 1000 DVDs plus the Lightroom cataloging is not a pleasant thought. Since the data were still on the RAID discs, I decided to try to recover them. I found and bought some RAID recovery software, got some new discs for the RAID array and a case for the old drives, and I started the recovery process this week. It looks like I will be able to get back most of the files. But even for my modest collection it will take 5 days to analyze the discs and another 5 days to copy the recovered material; then it will probably take me a couple of months, on and off, to discover what I have lost and to restore it as best I can.

georg16nik · Apr 28, 2015

Ko.Fe. said:
It is peripheral, connectors and OS. Where are twenty years old HDD. Where do you connect them now?
Go to antique mall and have a look at 100+ years old pictures before talking about paper degradation. I can't print it is so good now .

indeed.
given a reasonable temperature and humidity, paper is good for at least a few hundred of years, same for film on PET base.

Today or in the foreseeable, the important color film originals are still going to be stored on black and white YCM separation masters.
Digital born originals are printed on film for long storage as well.

Replacing silver with semiconductors is thus far tragedy, comedy and science fiction.

Paul Verizzo · May 12, 2015

Ko.Fe. said:
It is peripheral, connectors and OS. Where are twenty years old HDD. Where do you connect them now?
Go to antique mall and have a look at 100+ years old pictures before talking about paper degradation. I can't print it is so good now .

Twenty year old hard drives? Not a problem. Do you know computers?

A fire about wiped out my collection of family photos in 1988. This was WAY before any computerization was around. If it had been been, there would have been no problem recovering images off of my computer or the cloud. Today, some of those images I could salvage are digitized, albeit with soot embedded, misbegotten color, etc. Safer than back then.

Today I have a second hard drive internal in my box, I do a simple clone every week or two. Everything is automatically updated to The Cloud every couple of hours. I keep a hard drive with power supply and USB cord in the trunk of my car. On the first of every month, it gets cloned.

I guarantee you that I'm far better covered now than in 1988.

AgX · May 12, 2015

Strange enough I seem to be the only one who cannot access that article.

EDIT:
OOOPS, this thread started 2009!

Truzi · May 12, 2015

Try the Internet Archive. I think this might be the story in question:
https://web.archive.org/web/2009102...business/story/0,28124,26242938-25658,00.html

pentaxuser · May 12, 2015

AgX said:
Strange enough I seem to be the only one who cannot access that article.

EDIT:
OOOPS, this thread started 2009!

It is forbidden for me as well. The way it has been expressed in English suggests that it is strengstens verboten

pentaxuser

Murray Kelly · May 13, 2015

Thanks for the web archive link.
I was the OP and had forgotten all about the thread. Things were made worse because I couldn't read the newspaper article myself - and it is delivered here daily! Just News Corp policy I presume?
I should have done a copy/paste in the first place. A bit like accessing digital photographs in a weird way.

nworth · May 15, 2015

Paul Verizzo said:
Twenty year old hard drives? Not a problem. Do you know computers? ...

A huge problem, and I know computers very well (51 years worth). The interfaces have changed, and you can not get adapters for older equipment. Fortunately, the ISO standard DVD, and CD ROM formats have remained stable, but there is no telling how long that will last. It is quite impossible to read the older tape formats or older floppy discs on small computers unless you custom build and custom program the interfaces for older equipment. Most people can't do that, and those that can certainly don't want to.

Speaking of CD and DVD ROMs, they store their information in dyes, which in time will deteriorate. I've had a few (fortunately very few) failures already in discs dating back to the 1990s.

DREW WILEY · May 15, 2015

You find a hundred year old box of prints in the attic and you can thumb through them to see if some are interesting and worth saving or not.
A hundred years from now and someone stumbles onto yet another box of discs that all look the same, why bother, unless something like,
"secret Swiss bank accounts" is written on them; and even then, it might be an "if' recovering the data. More likely, it there will just be another 14000 "selfies" on the damn things, just like the other fourteen million already in the landfill. Not good for anything but skeet shooting. Nobody is going to show up at Antiques Roadshow with a disc. Not exactly the kind of thing anyone will covet and display above
their fireplace mantle. I feel the same way about e-books.

Prest_400 · May 16, 2015

DREW WILEY said:
You find a hundred year old box of prints in the attic and you can thumb through them to see if some are interesting and worth saving or not.
A hundred years from now and someone stumbles onto yet another box of discs that all look the same, why bother, unless something like,
"secret Swiss bank accounts" is written on them; and even then, it might be an "if' recovering the data. More likely, it there will just be another 14000 "selfies" on the damn things, just like the other fourteen million already in the landfill. Not good for anything but skeet shooting. Nobody is going to show up at Antiques Roadshow with a disc. Not exactly the kind of thing anyone will covet and display above
their fireplace mantle. I feel the same way about e-books.

It kind of happened to me with some videotapes of my dad's trips in the 80s. I keep thinking I should get the video8 camera to play and see them, together with trying to transfer them to digital.

The slides and negs+prints taken on the same trips are directly accesible. Infact it was the beauty of some of the slides that inspired me to shoot film.

About finding disks, don't know if anymore! People don't back up that much and most of that material is dumped up to the internet.
Bear in mind though that most of that is very disposable without much thought about permenence.
The internet, in the medium run can still be a good keeper. Tell that so some people I know that are embarassed when someone comments their teen pictures from 5 to 8 years ago!
I do have to take care of the hard drives and files. My laptop decided to erase a 30GB file! Thankfully it is just a sync of what I have in a cloud service.

I recently went to a tintype local photographer, and aside of the process itself, I kept the plate. That one might just be the same 2 centuries from now...

<Beamed through Tapatalk relay>

Steve Smith · May 16, 2015

Paul Verizzo said:
Twenty year old hard drives? Not a problem. Do you know computers?

If you know what you are doing it's not a problem, but generally, it's not something the average person with a PC or laptop at home can do.

At work, I use a CNC router/drill which is 25 years old. It has a CP/M operating system and boots up on a 5.25" disk. It originally loaded programmes from punched paper tape but now we have a PC interfaced to it which has to pretend to be a paper tape reader to load up programmes.

So it is possible, but usually not practical.

Prest_400 said:
It kind of happened to me with some videotapes of my dad's trips in the 80s. I keep thinking I should get the video8 camera to play and see them, together with trying to transfer them to digital.

A while ago we inherited some Super 8 films which were shot by my wife's great aunt. To ensure they could be viewed by future generations, she had the good sense to convert them to video tape... except that she chose Betamax. We watched them properly with a projector!

Most people can find family photographs going back 50, perhaps 100 years. I would be willing to bet that most people can't find their digital photos from 15 years ago.

Steve.

Paul Verizzo · May 16, 2015

Despite all the dire predictions of tape degradation, whether audio (ca. 1974) or video (8mm, late 1980's) if there is any degradation that is of even slightly annoying level, I've not seen it or heard it.

I wouldn't trust DVD's anymore to store data, and besides, 4GB is nothing these days. If you have lost data on on CD/DVD and you know it, it is not a photograph or video. Too much data to miss a few bytes.

If you have important data on old formats and hardware, it wasn't important enough to migrate or find a long term solution, like cloud.

No matter what storage medium, something is or will be a problem. This is getting to the angels dancing on the head of a pin level.

Prest_400 · May 16, 2015

Paul Verizzo said:
Despite all the dire predictions of tape degradation, whether audio (ca. 1974) or video (8mm, late 1980's) if there is any degradation that is of even slightly annoying level, I've not seen it or heard it.

.

As you mention that. Basically most contemporary music is on reels of tape!
The most important issue here was about some formulations in the 70s that required baking and having proper working tape decks. (The former is what I heard about studio masters, dunno if it affects consumer tape)
The cassete boombox in the kitchen still plays 15 year cassette mixtapes happily. Other drives that have been idle for long are dead sadly.

Personally I've lost quite some photos by misplacing the files...

<Beamed through Tapatalk relay>

polyglot · May 17, 2015

How's that Magnum archive at the bottom of the WTC looking now?

Paul Verizzo · May 17, 2015

polyglot said:
How's that Magnum archive at the bottom of the WTC looking now?

Doing fine on the cloud? He he he.........

One reason I left one cloud backup company - but not the only one - was realizing that their only server is in California. Although I left there before "The Big One" in January 1994, I witnessed the destruction and disruption in our society via friends, business, and a later visit.

I've been with Crashplan for a few years. http://www.code42.com/crashplan/ Primary server in geophysically boring Minnesota, backed up to a couple other servers in other countries. Pretty safe, I'd say. A lot safer than my garage was in 1988, for sure. Digital images stored as file types, not on local hardware (HD, CD, DVD) should be safe and usable for centuries to come. Well, OK, maybe one of them.

Paul Verizzo · May 17, 2015

Steve Smith said:
Most people can find family photographs going back 50, perhaps 100 years. I would be willing to bet that most people can't find their digital photos from 15 years ago.

Steve.

I can. First ones, 1999. All nicely kept in dated/topical folders. Thrice backed up, on and off site.

And the vast majority of film that I've shot, 1954? to present. All nicely scanned and kept in dated/topical folders. Thrice backed up, on and off site.

And the many prints and slides I mentioned early on that survived a fire, sort of. All nicely scanned, with carbon spots and discolorations and kept in dated/topical folders. Thrice backed up, on and off site.

And the prints and slides that burned up? Nothing.

RPC · May 17, 2015

Paul Verizzo said:
I can. First ones, 1999. All nicely kept in dated/topical folders. Thrice backed up, on and off site.

And the vast majority of film that I've shot, 1954? to present. All nicely scanned and kept in dated/topical folders. Thrice backed up, on and off site.

And the many prints and slides I mentioned early on that survived a fire, sort of. All nicely scanned, with carbon spots and discolorations and kept in dated/topical folders. Thrice backed up, on and off site.

And the prints and slides that burned up? Nothing.

But if someone had put as much effort into protecting the prints and slides, which apparently no one did (i.e. storing them in a protected place), as you have put into backing up your images, they would likely still be around.

So it is more an issue of how much effort you put into protecting them, not whether they are analog or digital.

Paul Verizzo · May 18, 2015

RPC said:
But if someone had put as much effort into protecting the prints and slides, which apparently no one did (i.e. storing them in a protected place), as you have put into backing up your images, they would likely still be around.

So it is more an issue of how much effort you put into protecting them, not whether they are analog or digital.

Oh, come on. What is a person to do? Rent a giant safe deposit box in a bank for a few thousand a year? And then never get around to enjoying them? Floods and fires happen, as I've experienced.

At the end of the day, or century, they are safer on the cloud than anywhere, let alone thrice backed up.

Sheesh.

RPC · May 19, 2015

Paul Verizzo said:
Oh, come on. What is a person to do? Rent a giant safe deposit box in a bank for a few thousand a year? And then never get around to enjoying them? Floods and fires happen, as I've experienced.

At the end of the day, or century, they are safer on the cloud than anywhere, let alone thrice backed up.

Sheesh.

Oh, come on. You wouldn't have to do that. Yes, today scanning and backup is the practical way today to deal with the problem but in the past, people could have (and do) store negatives in home safes that offer some protection from fire. Multiple prints could have been made from negatives and stored in various locations, including at home for viewing, just like files. Duplicates of negatives and slides could have been made. There would have been some cost, but what is the cost when you loose them.

My point is your photos were lost because they weren't backed up, but could have been, just as digital files can be today, not because they weren't digital.

georg16nik · May 19, 2015

Dear Paul Verizzo, it's OK to be clueless about archiving.
Keep those clouds running and God bless.
You will need it.

Paul Verizzo · May 19, 2015

georg16nik said:
Dear Paul Verizzo, it's OK to be clueless about archiving.
Keep those clouds running and God bless.
You will need it.

You sure do love to argue in the face of logic, and worse, experience. First it was about freezing film, now you think yourself not clueless on archiving? What? You print everything out and keep the prints in a four hour rated fireproof safe? The real world until recently is that most photographs were printed and put into albums, or onto walls, or into the proverbial shoe boxes.

I'll bet most photo luminaries never did much more.

Listen, "buddy," I've lost prints to fire and short of my hyperbole above - which means no one can readily enjoy them - having them on three hard drives of my own in three locations and a cloud hard drive which is RAID redundant at the site and backed up to two other sites, I'm going to need luck?

And I can still print them.

A reawakening to film?

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