I'm starting to get into photography, and have been thinking alot about storage of my photos. I know in the immediate future I can store them on a hard drive, and then back them up to the internet through a service like Flikr or any other number of online storage solutions. However, I'm wondering if a hard drive and online backup is good for long term storage, say photos I want to save for decades down the road.
I have looked into gold layer DVD's, which claim they last 50-100 years. If I put my photos on these I could put them away in a safety deposit box or safe and be sure they would last decades down the road. However, the problem with that is will the computers of the future even be able to read the file types that are saved on the DVD, assuming the DVD lasts that long? Would you even be able to use DVD's on future computers?
In terms of the online storage, a site like Flikr might be popular now, but will it still be around 10-20 years down the road? If it does go out of business I guess you could download your entire collection and upload it to another service that exists at the time, but then that's not a real long term solution, just a stop gap measure that will force you to always be up on whether your photo service is still functioning and not about to go under.
It seems then the only long term storage solution is just to keep transferring photos from old media formats to new ones, as there is nothing I can think of that you can store your photos on that will last 100 years and still be accessible 100 years from now.
The only other solution I guess is actually printing out the photos on archival quality paper, but that is not feasible given a collection of thousands and thousands.
What are other people's thoughts?
I have looked into gold layer DVD's, which claim they last 50-100 years. If I put my photos on these I could put them away in a safety deposit box or safe and be sure they would last decades down the road. However, the problem with that is will the computers of the future even be able to read the file types that are saved on the DVD, assuming the DVD lasts that long? Would you even be able to use DVD's on future computers?
In terms of the online storage, a site like Flikr might be popular now, but will it still be around 10-20 years down the road? If it does go out of business I guess you could download your entire collection and upload it to another service that exists at the time, but then that's not a real long term solution, just a stop gap measure that will force you to always be up on whether your photo service is still functioning and not about to go under.
It seems then the only long term storage solution is just to keep transferring photos from old media formats to new ones, as there is nothing I can think of that you can store your photos on that will last 100 years and still be accessible 100 years from now.
The only other solution I guess is actually printing out the photos on archival quality paper, but that is not feasible given a collection of thousands and thousands.
What are other people's thoughts?
