• Welcome to Photrio!
    Registration is fast and free. Join today to unlock search, see fewer ads, and access all forum features.
    Click here to sign up

Not sure a SD card would have survived.

It's an interesting story, and there is another thread.

As for SD cards, probably not for 100 years, and probably there won't be anything that can read one 100 years from now.
But, FWIW, I dropped one out of my Palm into the snow one winter in my driveway, and my wife found it while gardening 1+ years later, and it works just fine.
 
Those SD and CF cards are pretty resilient they survived quiet a few washings in my washing machine. I seem to constantly forget them in my pants don't know why.:devil: must be a freudian thing.
 
I have many 2x3 negatives of my grandfather when he was approx 5-6 years old, except for some minor handling damage over the years, still print beautifully. Making these negatives 105- 110 years old. Negatives of him in France during WWI are in marvelous condition and print very nicely. These negatives will be printable for maybe another 100 years who knows. So I'll keep my FILM and my darkroom for recording my little piece of the world. Some digital snapshots that i took are all gone because my computer crashed the other day and is toast. Like was said above most digital images never see the light of day and live in a little plastic box. Digital has its place in photography but will NEVER be archival to the point my grand kids kids will see the images.
 
analog rules


Awesome work by your family to protect the history there. I scored some old negs from my grandparents but they have curled lengthways very badly. Tried some printing years ago off them but iwasn't really successful. should I re wash them maybe?
 
Cruzingoose said:
They may be tough on the short term........... But long term? I'd bet all the tea in China that in 20 years there won't be any available new, or be anything that could even read them.
Click to expand...


I take you up on that bet.

I think it will be possible to read USB in 20 years, simply because there is so much media and devices for USB. There will need to be legacy support.

There are USB readers that take all formats of memory cards.

Could we make it all the coffe in Kenya instead? I don't drink tea.
 
thanks for sharing long liove film
 
Programmable micro controllers with the same kind of memory technology inside are said to retain data up to 40 years. Eventually the bits will rot in the memory cells and then the image is gone forever. The bigger question is if anything can read such an old memory interface in a decade or two. What if you stored your pictures on 5 1/4" floppies? Those readers are getting hard to get now. (Not to mention the read error rate...).

Once I successfully read 30 year old 1/4" backup tapes. That required an old style SCSI-interface and the tapes only contained 300 megs each.
 
Jaf-Photo said:
I take you up on that bet.

I think it will be possible to read USB in 20 years, simply because there is so much media and devices for USB. There will need to be legacy support.
Click to expand...
I found some old DD DS 3.5" floppies last used in the early 1990s, about 22 years ago when it was normal to have a drive capable of DD/DS. Think you can read them with an USB floppy drive? DD is Double Density, not the High Density (HD) that was the last iteration of 3.5" floppies.




EDIT: That was a rhetorical question. I certainly can read the floppies, even HD/DS that windows erroneously claims are blank and in need of formatting. However, I work in IT, so am not the computer equivalent of someone who found a box of grandpa's USB sticks in a shoebox under the bed.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
As someone who still has my first computer (TRS-80 Model 1), I can attest to the limited lifespan of 5.25 inch floppies. A lot of the disks I have are copy protected and a few years ago I sent them to an archival service to read and copy them to new 5.25 disks. Today those disks are getting really hard to find, and what I can find are wearhouse leftovers that are not overly reliable.

Due to the lack of space in my house, I am forced to use a hybrid workflow, but I keep the negatives.

I really doubt that compact flash and SD cards will be readable in the long term given the nature of digital.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register