Apparently, not so safe. Popular
Science Magazine, Dec. 2013 issue, says that odds are low that saving our
digital photos on CD’s and hard drives (like backup removable, remote, hard
drives) will be safe for the next generation.
The initial thinking was a CD would be good for 100 years, now they
are re-thinking it because many fail in 10 years.
Old fashioned paper has done
very well by comparison. Early paper (the acid free kind) is still going strong
after 100 years. A typical spinning hard disk drive has a
problem I didn’t know about : If you
don’t use it, you lose it. “You’ve got to have it spinning regularly or you are
not going to be able to play it”. Says Howard Besser, archivist, NYU.
An even greater problem than
the durability of our thumb drives, CD’s, and hard drives, will be the decoding
of them sometime in the future, when the software is no longer around that
created them. Think Windows 95. Think Newton. Think CPM.
This is a distressing
thought, since I think we all are planning for our children’s photos to last
forever in a closet somewhere on a never-used hard drive backup device. Personally, I am trying to convert my VHS tapes of my
children to DVD format, and sometimes the tapes will not play. Or break easily. And now the wisdom seems to be that the DVD isn’t an eternal
format either. With BlueRay and whatever
else follows, DVD players might become like Beta-max video recorders. I still have one, but wouldn’t know where to
buy another if it broke. I have Beta
tapes from 1982. With valuable things on
them. History if you will. Maybe we should
have taken Kodak photos instead ? But wait, where is Kodak?
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