Article Vol28 No4

Digital Images, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?

Jim Rouse (Member No 5496)

As genealogists we all treasure family photographs, be they of people, places or events, they help us visualise and perhaps gain some idea about the type of person our ancestors were and what their life was like. If we're very lucky, we may have inherited family albums and even luckier yet find that the subjects have been identified for us. But sadly for most of us, finding the odd formal portrait here and there and from more recent times, small family snapshots are the most we can expect. But what about our children? and our grandchildren? What will we leave them? Digital Photography offers many benefits, we can take hundreds of photos and put them into our computers or burn them onto CDs or DVDs and we don’t have the huge expense of having them developed and printed...

But the questions arise, how long a life does a computer have? How long does a CD or DVD last? and while there are measures & steps we take to prolong the longevity of our media, the answer is that most digital images will have an ephemeral existence and if we don’t archive them in some way, we just won’t have them as a visual record. The ideal solution to this impermanence is that there should be an affordable storage medium that you can put away in a cupboard for 50 years and have it still be usable when it comes back out. However, the reality is that it just doesn't exist! The digital imaging industry as a whole ignores this aspect of its technology, at great peril not only to our own memories but the shared record of our culture. This is very serious issue that many who use digital cameras are aware of and attempt to address.

In an attempt to provide a degree of permanence to our images, many of us print out the best of them on high quality ink-jet printers. However, therein is another big problem, those printed pictures may disappear within a few years.

In a series of tests by the Image Permanence Institute (USA) pictures printed on using the latest dye-based printers were expected to last ten years. When users found that the colors in prints were changing drastically in as little as two months, printer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard commissioned research into the longevity of prints. Their current Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 475, a dye printer that produces snapshot-size photos, will produce photographs that are supposed to last 82 years, however we have no way of knowing if they will in fact last this long! No ink-jet printer will create "permanent" pictures or pictures that last anywhere near as long as those produced over a century ago. Take any assurances in terms of longevity given by printer manufacturers with a pinch of salt!

The best solution by which we can hope to preserve our digital images is by archiving them on your computer, taking time to catalogue them accurately and produce an index file. Keep a backup of the images on removable media CD or DVD, but bear in mind that these will in most cases need replacing every 2-3 years. Some CD-R manufacturers will tell you that their disks “should” last 100 years or even 200 years! But in my experience even using big-name brand CD’s is quite different and a lot of discs I burned and stored in a filing cabinet are mostly unreadable after 5 or 6 years. Most manufacturers advise that storing your backup disks in a cool, dry environment will help to prolong data life, while direct sunlight and fingerprints may cause damage to a CDROM. Your safest bet seems to be to buy a brand-name archive quality disk (usually gold coloured), and treat it as per the guidelines above, but don't expect it to last more than five years. Even if you manage to preserve data on disks beyond this time frame, will we still have CD-ROM readers in our computers? how many of us have hoards of useless 5.25” floppy disks or even 3.5” disks? Most new computers are sold without floppy disk drives; we can’t count on new technology being compatible with the media we now use. Nowadays since the coming of flash-drives (thumb drives, pen-drives, etc) I rarely burn data to CD unless I want to distribute that data. I carry a 4Gb flash drive in my pocket that can hold the equivalent of 6 CD’s, while’s it’s not a permanent solution for archiving images or other data, the development of flash-drives has impacted greatly upon sales of CD disks. Some new notebook computers currently on sale use flash-drive technology to replace mechanical hard drives, giving the benefit of lower cost, less weight, and reduced cost.

Asking “How long will a Computer Hard Disk last?” is like the question "How long is a piece of string?" the answer being not long! If you can get 4 to 5 years or more from a Hard Drive, you're doing very well, any longer than that and you're living on borrowed time. And like any other mechanical device, hard drives can fail at any time, so the message is, back up and back up frequently!

If you can afford it, buy an external USB hard drive, these are quite cheap (starting around $80 and up to $250) better yet, buy 2 of the smaller capacity drives and share your precious eggs between two baskets (put copies of all your images on both drives). These removable drives are still mechanical devices and have a finite life but they should, if treated responsibly, last longer than the hard-working continually stressed hard-drive within your computer. A better solution for those who can afford it is an external backup solution that is actually two hard drives within a small case. This type of external backup utilises RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology, which is also known as “Disk Mirroring” and consists of at least two drives that duplicate the storage of data. So, if one disk fails your data and images will be safe on the other drive!

This solution currently costs between $400 and $600 (but may decrease in cost like most new technology) and could provide a good solution for a branch library.

Hopefully in time, a long-term affordable storage medium will be developed and a printed paper process will be developed that will match the longevity of some early black and white photography, but in the interim we can only work within the limitations of existing technology to preserve our images and other data.

Perhaps there’s a business opportunity out there for someone who could archive our Family History images and files and guarantee to keep them current in terms of technology?

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	*Tasmanian Family History Society Inc.* An Article from Tasmanian Ancestry
	Digital Images, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Jim Rouse (Member No 5496) As genealogists we all treasure family photographs, be they of people, places or events, they help us visualise and perhaps gain some idea about the type of person our ancestors were and what their life was like. If we're very lucky, we may have inherited family albums and even luckier yet find that the subjects have been identified for us. But sadly for most of us, finding the odd formal portrait here and there and from more recent times, small family snapshots are the most we can expect. But what about our children? and our grandchildren? What will we leave them? Digital Photography offers many benefits, we can take hundreds of photos and put them into our computers or burn them onto CDs or DVDs and we don’t have the huge expense of having them developed and printed... But the questions arise, how long a life does a computer have? How long does a CD or DVD last? and while there are measures & steps we take to prolong the longevity of our media, the answer is that most digital images will have an ephemeral existence and if we don’t archive them in some way, we just won’t have them as a visual record. The ideal solution to this impermanence is that there should be an affordable storage medium that you can put away in a cupboard for 50 years and have it still be usable when it comes back out. However, the reality is that it just doesn't exist! The digital imaging industry as a whole ignores this aspect of its technology, at great peril not only to our own memories but the shared record of our culture. This is very serious issue that many who use digital cameras are aware of and attempt to address. In an attempt to provide a degree of permanence to our images, many of us print out the best of them on high quality ink-jet printers. However, therein is another big problem, those printed pictures may disappear within a few years. In a series of tests by the Image Permanence Institute (USA) pictures printed on using the latest dye-based printers were expected to last ten years. When users found that the colors in prints were changing drastically in as little as two months, printer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard commissioned research into the longevity of prints. Their current Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 475, a dye printer that produces snapshot-size photos, will produce photographs that are supposed to last 82 years, however we have no way of knowing if they will in fact last this long! No ink-jet printer will create "permanent" pictures or pictures that last anywhere near as long as those produced over a century ago. Take any assurances in terms of longevity given by printer manufacturers with a pinch of salt! The best solution by which we can hope to preserve our digital images is by archiving them on your computer, taking time to catalogue them accurately and produce an index file. Keep a backup of the images on removable media CD or DVD, but bear in mind that these will in most cases need replacing every 2-3 years. Some CD-R manufacturers will tell you that their disks “should” last 100 years or even 200 years! But in my experience even using big-name brand CD’s is quite different and a lot of discs I burned and stored in a filing cabinet are mostly unreadable after 5 or 6 years. Most manufacturers advise that storing your backup disks in a cool, dry environment will help to prolong data life, while direct sunlight and fingerprints may cause damage to a CDROM. Your safest bet seems to be to buy a brand-name archive quality disk (usually gold coloured), and treat it as per the guidelines above, but don't expect it to last more than five years. Even if you manage to preserve data on disks beyond this time frame, will we still have CD-ROM readers in our computers? how many of us have hoards of useless 5.25” floppy disks or even 3.5” disks? Most new computers are sold without floppy disk drives; we can’t count on new technology being compatible with the media we now use. Nowadays since the coming of flash-drives (thumb drives, pen-drives, etc) I rarely burn data to CD unless I want to distribute that data. I carry a 4Gb flash drive in my pocket that can hold the equivalent of 6 CD’s, while’s it’s not a permanent solution for archiving images or other data, the development of flash-drives has impacted greatly upon sales of CD disks. Some new notebook computers currently on sale use flash-drive technology to replace mechanical hard drives, giving the benefit of lower cost, less weight, and reduced cost. Asking “How long will a Computer Hard Disk last?” is like the question "How long is a piece of string?" the answer being not long! If you can get 4 to 5 years or more from a Hard Drive, you're doing very well, any longer than that and you're living on borrowed time. And like any other mechanical device, hard drives can fail at any time, so the message is, back up and back up frequently! If you can afford it, buy an external USB hard drive, these are quite cheap (starting around $80 and up to $250) better yet, buy 2 of the smaller capacity drives and share your precious eggs between two baskets (put copies of all your images on both drives). These removable drives are still mechanical devices and have a finite life but they should, if treated responsibly, last longer than the hard-working continually stressed hard-drive within your computer. A better solution for those who can afford it is an external backup solution that is actually two hard drives within a small case. This type of external backup utilises RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology, which is also known as “Disk Mirroring” and consists of at least two drives that duplicate the storage of data. So, if one disk fails your data and images will be safe on the other drive! This solution currently costs between $400 and $600 (but may decrease in cost like most new technology) and could provide a good solution for a branch library. Hopefully in time, a long-term affordable storage medium will be developed and a printed paper process will be developed that will match the longevity of some early black and white photography, but in the interim we can only work within the limitations of existing technology to preserve our images and other data. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity out there for someone who could archive our Family History images and files and guarantee to keep them current in terms of technology? 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