Archival Quality of Digital Storage Media

Not only do you have to worry about whether or not your CD-R, DVD-R, or hard disk will deteriorate over time, you need to worry about whether you will have anything in 20 years that will be able to read them: Ansel Adams negatives from the 1920s are still printable... I have CDs from 1985 that are wasting away.

That is why I'm staying with film, scanning when necessary.

I've used good quality CDR's for years & have had no worries, my company also uses them to archive extremely valuable work. Basically, don't buy the cheap stuff, look after them & store them well, don't stick labels to them . . . they will last ages, I have some that have seen light use for a decade now and run just fine.

Lastly . . . . I always have my negs as a backup as I still shoot to film & still have my darkroom. However I do 90% of my work digitally as the time saved allows me to get through hundreds more negatives than I would otherwise have time for.

There will be a better system soon as we are in between archiving technologies. In a couple of years it will all be on 20 gig RAM cartridges . . . that are fragile to electric pulses . . . when oh when will it end!?

Gavin

I have burned many hundreds of CD's; many old ones are 4+ years old; a few are now unreadable. These are with the most expensive name brand CD's. Some of these "troublemaker" discs can be still be read in parts by trying with several different machines... the reflectance drops with time...Some TIFF files are readable in the top part; but the bottom is line wrapped/garbled....One was a 80 Meg scan of an old Magazine; all retouched for a customers poster.......With compressed formats; such as JPEG; these seem to be harder to recover from troublesome discs......The old discs were written at a whopping 2X or 4x speed; on a CD writer that cost about 600 bucks; the files then were read again by the writer; and another CD reader; before being stored away..................I wonder how long the no name "ammo-pak" discs will last; that everybody uses today; that have almost no cost......

Most of my old CDR's are still readable, most of my new ones are only readable in a few selected drives (very comforting indeed).

I scan my negatives and burn on CD's for daily use and store the negatives in sleeves for archival.

I have no doubt which form is more reliable.

I shoot products for clients with a D1x, but if i want to make sure it can last, i will shoot film, keeping film is more easy to organize and you can throw a batch of film on the boxlight without any extra hardware or dealing with colorspace, but with a batch of cd-r/dvd-r you will need a lot of time for searching.

digital won't last, I have many Kodak's photcd that i make in 1990, but now it failed one by one, and osx is starting to un-support these old format, yes the disk look like brand new after 13 years, but each year companys like adobe will start to fade it away.

the problem with scanned cd-r, is that without the right hardware and software you can't open any of these images, today you might think it is more fun shooting all digital and save alot of money, but after 10-20 years it will be a nightmight finding any software that can read the format, just like you have some important data that you stored in those 5.25" floppy disk 10 years ago, now it is very hard to find a floppy drive that can read these floppy.

last time i heard that there will be a new format called blue-ray to replace dvd, so you will need to tranfer all these image over and over.

Hi,

I have recorded about 100 CDR ( with mostly 25-50MB images in the past 3 years. I have problems reading 4 images, so far.

I have switch to Mitsui CDR because Kodak apparently doesn't make disks anymore. I understand that gold colored is better than blue or green because of the recording layer is more archival. The "archival" quality disks also have a thicker clear layer rendering scratches less damaging.

Also, don't use alcohol-based pens. They will seep through and destroy the recording layer eventually.

Finally, make two copies of each disk and put one away where it doesn't get used.

I still use film and scan but you need a good system for scanned images anyway.

I store in uncompressed tif format because it is lossless and I suppose it is a format that will always be around.

The sad fact is that if you want to keep something for even 20 years, digital looks increasing unlikely as a candidate. It's not only the keeping qualities of the media, which is problematic, but also the compatibility issues. Who these days has an eight inch disk drive? Yet, less than 20 years ago, I was still storing company critical data on these big floppies. Regretably, CD and DVD are likely to go the same way if the big corporates have their way. After all, once they've saturated the market for DVD players they'll need something different to sell us...

For archival qualities stick with analogue. You can still play 78 RPM records on a suitable deck.

Hi

Does anyone know the reference point with respect to film? I mainly work in Black & White and now that their stability is tested but what about colour slide or colour neg film. How long will it last?

I have sort of taken the view that I won't bother with digital archiving, print it out archivally with pigment inks and hope.

All this digital backup business seems a tremendous hassle.

Tapas

Lee, most of the folks above who responded completely missed the point. You asked if digital media is archival, and this is a question that many serious archivists are struggling with. There are two parts to this answer.

First, if you want to record your data onto some sort of media such as a CD-R and expect to dependably retrieve this information in two or so decades, the answer is no, it is almost hopeless. You have three things to contend with. 1. Will the media survive physically over time? 2. Will you have a machine, some sort of hardware, that can read this media? 3. Will the computer that you are using at that time have an operating system or command system that can interface with the reading device so that it can translate the signal and convert it into a useful format? The probability of a yes answer for items 1, 2, and 3 is pretty low. Say each item is 50 percent. 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.125.

If you mean can digital media be reproduced readily on a regular basis, then the answer is yes, it is archival. If you are willing to translate your files every ten or so years to the type of storage system that is considered the state of the art at that time, then you can probably achieve an almost perfect reproduction. In that case, your archives will live forever as long as you have the discipline or money to continue the periodic reproduction.

The advantage of paper or silver gelatin emulsions is that no (or only very primitive) translation hardware is necessary. You look at the photograph and there it is. These are the true archival media!

Take a look at some of the web pages for the Library of Congress or some of the library science journals more more on this topic. Fascinating subject.