Old Negs

I lost several years worth of color negs and prints due to wrong storage -- I had had no idea just how cold and moist our apartment building's basement could get, and how happily that stuff literally rots and moulds within only one central European winter. Lesson learned; not gonna happen again. I also lost pretty much all of the audio CDs I recorded (i.e. burned) during the late 1990s -- without even the tiniest moment of wrong storage (or even without ever actually using them). Their surface just came off all by itself. Made me a happy vinyl user (again).

summicron1 said:

tests show that standard CDs only last about 10 years. Even the gold colored ones don't do all that well. The problem is not just dye decay, but decay of electronic media on the molecular level. Even on a flash drive or hard disk, the file information depends on the proper arrangement of the atoms in plus- and minus- positions, and over the months and years those things can shift, causing file corruption and then all is lost.

The Smithsonian and other museums -- including the one i work at -- are very worried about this.

And all this is assuming that the software to recover images from electronic media still exists in 10 or 20 years. Try to open up files on an old 5 inch floppy, you will quickly see the problem.

Meanwhile, my parent's pictures shot in the 40s when they were married, stored in old paper photo albums, still look like the day they came home from the drug store.

Congratulations on your find. Buy yourself some archival negative sleeves and keep them safe.

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What's the Smithsonian doing about it?

Congrats on your find! After my grandmother passed away, my parents had the chore of cleaning out her house. Along the way, they found a bunch of old negatives her father had shot (and possibly her mother, they both were known to use cameras). Some are unprintable conventionally due to being on nitrate-base film, but I've still done some contact prints. Even without knowing who many of the people are, it's cool to have photos of one's ancestors. I even have photos from my great-great-grandparents 50th wedding anniversary.

Is the way CD players read music CDs different to the way computers read files on a disc, or is it the same method? I've had old burned file CDs rejected from my new iMac, but old music album CDs are no problem.

osprey48 said:

Is the way CD players read music CDs different to the way computers read files on a disc, or is it the same method? I've had old burned file CDs rejected from my new iMac, but old music album CDs are no problem.

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It is probably because the home-burned CDs don't use the same material as factory-made.
The data is read the same for data and audio CDs.
There is a difference in how the data is structured on audio versus data CDs. The Audio CD format actually allows it to play music even with a certain degree of data loss/corruption. The data CD format, even though it has some redundancy, does not. Certain errors in data will render the disk useless.

This isn't the first time my Dad has dug out old stuff. A few years ago he retrieved his old 6x6cm slides from the 60s and 70s. They had been in the loft, and the earliest ones were in a bad way, with faded colours and magenta casts. I managed to bring the colours back with Photoshop after a lot of fiddling about, but some were beyond help. We also have boxes of B&W 3x3 inch slides taken by an unknown ancestor about 120 years ago, so photographic relics are not that unusual in our family, but its still a miracle any of this stuff survives various world wars, house moves, and sporadic clear-outs!

CDs were not around 30 or 40 years ago. We had capacitance disks that were 10" or 12" in diameter and vinyl. CDs did exist, but not generally for the public due to expense.

PE

The BBC did an update of the Domesday survey on its 900 year anniversary in the mid 80s on laser disc, but have spent the last 10 years or so reformatting the info so people can actually read it, and before it gets lost. Here's the link for more detailed info.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13367398

An anecdotal tale…

A few years ago my wife decided to organise her grandmother and grandfathers 'life stories' along with some other family history into a book. The 'other family history' info included a transcript of an ancestor's diary of his voyage to Australia in 1856. The distant relative who had an electronic copy of this happened to live nearby and was happy for us to try to resurrect it because he didn't have the computer it was created on (or the program to go with it!). If I was successful he had other documents he would be thankful getting back from the dead. Thankfully I still had a PC with a 5.25" drive and managed to get a copy off the disk. Then after much searching I managed to identify the program that created it, and through pure luck... someone had 'archived' a copy of the program on their site. The program opened the file and I managed to extract the text into a plain .txt file. We used that to produce the book. We had a visitor from England just last week who asked if they could have a copy. Easy I said... I keep everything, either on my main PC or backed up on hard drives. I only recently upgrade my desktop and guess what... no book files! So much for that confidence! I dug out a heap of CDs and started sifting through them. Was hoping I didn't have to resort to floppies or stiffies (3.5 floppies) cause that was going to involve installing a drive into a PC. Had a few CDs that couldn't be read but eventually found a PDF of the book file which I quickly copied to the hard drive. I still need to find the original files as it includes lots of scans of photos that materialised when my wife put out a request for any photos family had in their possession. I have the feeling that I used Pagemaker to compose the book. If so, that will be another challenge as that program seems to have fallen out of favour these days… I’ll have to see if Indesign can read it! What this has prompted me to add to my ‘to do’ list is to go through all my backup CDs and DVDs and copy to multiple hard disks (I’ve never had one of those fail)

I've had hard drives fail on home PCs, and it is not uncommon at work (IT department). If you do multiple drives, you may want to consider a (software) RAID 5. Solid State drives are touted as more reliable, but if one fails, it will be very difficult to get data from the it. Hard drives are easier (both are expensive, though).

You might also want to print the files with a decent (not inkjet or "wax") printer, just to be safe.

Truzi said:

I've had hard drives fail on home PCs, and it is not uncommon at work (IT department). If you do multiple drives, you may want to consider a (software) RAID 5. Solid State drives are touted as more reliable, but if one fails, it will be very difficult to get data from the it. Hard drives are easier (both are expensive, though).

You might also want to print the files with a decent (not inkjet or "wax") printer, just to be safe.

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Good advice. Also back up on external discs.

However this does not prevent problems of changing formats or program obsilence discussed two posts ago by Nige.

Sirius Glass said:

However this does not prevent problems of changing formats or program obsilence discussed two posts ago by Nige.

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Excellent point. That's where I forgot to mention needing a treadmill

It's good to use open (source) file formats. Even if they become obsolete, at least someone can get a hold of the source code and compile a program to read them. Always have the text as some sort of plain text file, and save graphics as non-proprietary (open-source) and non-lossy formats. That way you have a better chance at reconstructing your media if the program you made the documents with ceases to exist. For example, if you use Word or InDesign, only use that for the final version - keep all the content as basic text and graphics files as well.

It goes beyond that guys. Ever hear of PCMCIA? This card format is becoming obsolete and thus ANY data on them is GWTW. I have some software that will only run on Windows, under Linux, under Windows. Now that is a mess. One group of legacy data can only be read by OS/2 and the format is HPFS in some cases. There is software to translate, but it isn't very good.

I have Jazz and Zip drives, touted as excellent methods of backup in their day (just the '90s) and they are either suffering click of death or having r/w problems. Syquest drives are just as bad. The best is Jazz though of the lot.

How about tape backup? OMG what a mess. I'll stop here.

PE

I think I've only met one person who used PCMCIA for storage.

I've a coworker who just dug out a PCMCIA wireless NIC for his laptop, instead of buying an internal card (it's an older laptop but still serviceable). He was fortunate, though, as my other IT coworkers tend to throw away things they don't recognize, and they don't recognize much (like power supplies for thin-clients, which we had to repurchase at one point).

A few times a year we have some professor come in with important data on 3.5" floppies. I'm the only one who keeps a machine with a floppy drive (and who can get data with Linux when windows thinks the floppy is unformatted).

About five years ago I had to get data from an "ancient" machine used for joint-movement studies (hooked to some very expensive equipment). It had an old drive with MFM controller. That was fun. The OS wouldn't boot and we had nothing that could deal with the controller (I even brought in an old DEC Alpha from home), so I had to find something (Linux) that would boot from floppy on the 286 machine. I also had to deal with drive geometry for the first time in a long while. The platter(s) had some physically damaged areas, but I did manage to get 99% of the data off. Luckily the data was not proprietary - just flat "text" files that were easily read.

Photo Engineer said:

CDs were not around 30 or 40 years ago. We had capacitance disks that were 10" or 12" in diameter and vinyl. CDs did exist, but not generally for the public due to expense.

PE

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The first musical CD released was Billy Joel's 52nd Street on Oct 1, 1982, which was about 32 years ago.

hdeyong said:

The first musical CD released was Billy Joel's 52nd Street on Oct 1, 1982, which was about 32 years ago.

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What took place and what we could buy were 2 different things.

We had laser and capacitance disks in that era but no commercial CDs. When I went to Comdex (a regular yearly trip to Las Vegas I made for EK), CDs for data storage were just becoming available, but home CD players (and burners) were not available. I had to make do with Jazz, Zip and Syquest for "high capacity" hard disk storage, and they only did data. Today, all but the Jazz are virtually useless. Even that is difficult requiring a parallel port or a SCSI port.

And yes, data and music are 2 different formats and if you listen closely to some old music disks you can hear the errors ever so slightly in the music. Errors in a data disk will stop reads in their tracks (pun intended).

PE

I've been cleaning stuff around the house since I have off due to the holiday (Veterans day for those outside the U.S.), and I found an old external 16k RAM module for a Timex Sinclair computer (I think it may have been known as ZX models or Spectrum in Europe). I don't have G.A.S. for photo items, but seem to for computer tech - we've an old Sinclair somewhere, and a few Atari computers (as well as the previously mentioned DEC Alpha).

Anyway, this thing is a bit larger than a pack of cigarettes - for 16kb. If you couldn't afford a disk drive, you could use an old tape-recorder for storage on many old home computers.

Back in high school, forgotten in a dusty old closet, we had a few "computers" (really more like calculators) that stored data on magnet strips similar to large refrigerator magnets. I have no idea why the school kept them, but they were fun to toy with.

Funny this tread popped up. I found some old negatives (medium format) from studio pics of family taken 30 or so years ago. Was able to clean them with edwals and they printed well in a glass carrier. The film stock was much thicker. As thick as large format film which was odd. No markings on edges and cut crudely. Need to spot a few areas that didn't clean though.

It could be that you have sheet film dupes Newt. Back in the day, we used to dupe B&W and color onto sheet film, even if it was from roll film. This was then cut to size leaving no edge markings.

PE

Truzi said:

If you couldn't afford a disk drive, you could use an old tape-recorder for storage on many old home computers.

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Had that... listening to the sound of a program loading was almost therapeutic Ours was connected to a TRS-80 Model III (the fancy one with built in monitor!)... A few years later Dad upgraded it to floppy disks.

A friend wrote an assembly language program for the TRS-80 (he may have gotten it from a textbook), that played "Turkey in the Straw" on a frequency that a radio could pick up. It displayed a dancing figure on the monitor. It was loaded by using a tape recorder. My Apple ][ used a tape recorder as well, but only one kind would work.

PE

Fur Elise
Imperial March
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

If one remembers to copy data from one external hard drive to another every 5 years or so, copying the data can be a simple "fire and forget" operation, as opposed to reading a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, then writing it to another CD/DVD/Blu-Ray. I've set up some network accessible storage (NAS) with an external hard drive (with its own power supply) and a Raspberry Pi model B. All four computers run SyncBack Free to backup data to the external drive. In the event of a hard drive crash on any one of the computers, reinstall the OS, then programs, then copy the data from the networked backup drive back to the computer.

In 5 years, when it comes time to upgrade the external drive, I'll plug one into one of the computers and copy the data from the NAS to the computer, then plug the drive into the Raspberry Pi. A few commands later and the new drive will be the drive used for the NAS. Yes, it means I'll have to buy a new drive every 3-5 years, but the actual copying of the data from one drive to another is fire-and-forget.

This doesn't help with having software to read the data 50 years from now, but that's what the original transparency/negative is for, right? For JPEGs, at least, the first JPEG standard came out in 1992 - 18 years ago. AFAIK, today's software will still read those 18 year old JPEGs just fine. A JPEG is probably as close as you'll get to a standard that can be read 25-50 years from now. Or a TIFF maybe.

I'd go on, but that may be off-topic for this forum.

Photo Engineer said:

It could be that you have sheet film dupes Newt. Back in the day, we used to dupe B&W and color onto sheet film, even if it was from roll film. This was then cut to size leaving no edge markings.

PE

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Ah that's an interesting tidbit. The thicker film I think helped it survive in such good shape. They were basically in an envelope.

Newt_on_Swings said:

Ah that's an interesting tidbit. The thicker film I think helped it survive in such good shape. They were basically in an envelope.

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The negatives found at my grandmother's house were in a regular envelope only labeled "1912". Inside were several groups of frames, each wrapped in a piece of normal paper. All but one batch look basically fine, hardly any silvering even.