What is your long term archive solution?

I am not a great or famous photographer and my work has no significance to most of the world but I thought my kids/grandkids etc might someday like to look back at my images. I have been shooting digital since 2009. Every year I have kept my images on my laptop as I go and I back that up to an external drive about every 2-4 weeks. At the end of the year I copy all my keeper images (usually 10-15 gB total annually) to a separate flash drive and some years I have burned to DVD's as well. Also most of my keepers are uploaded to my Zenfolio account.

Recently I was doing my 2015 back up routine and became curious as to the longevity and stability of this type of media and was surprised to find that many sources do not consider any of these very secure beyond 5 to 10 years and recommend re-archiving periodically.

So my questions for the forum are these...are most folks concerned about long term preservation of their images? If so, what are you doing to store and protect your images for the long haul?

I started reading about M-disc....is anyone using this or know much about it? Seems like the best currently available long term option to me.

If I get to vote you'll publish a couple of books. Say start with a coffee table book. Then say a "Birds of the Southeastern US."

I rearchive about every three years. Typically by buying a newer larger external HD. Right now I have my long term archive in about 4 spots, including a 2TB hard drive located with family in Idaho. All my external hard drives are still working, but I've heard the same thing, that digital media is temporary.

Next, we do "best of" photo albums for each year. Yep, I am the one guy still buying 4x6 photo albums. I need to catch up on a few years, but we have most of them and getting caught up on the photo albums is one of this years planned winter projects.

Yes Joel... do a book. I bought two lay-flat photobook coupons (buy now, make book later) for Christmas. A 14"x11" and a 11"x8.5". I'm guessing you can do better. You've got so many high-quality shots of birds I'm sure you can get a bird book published.

Someone at work just bought an M-disc drive last week. He said it was surprisingly inexpensive. He got the one for 25GB disks, blu-ray BD-R compatible. Not sure what makes it special over other BD-Rs. A quick look at the MDisk site, and I see there are also 4.7GB (DVD size), 50GB (dual layer BluRay), and 100GB (quad layer bluRay). They're all rated for 1000 (roman numeral M) years, but I doubt you'll still find a compatible reader in 1000 years.

I see they're just over $100 on Amazon for one that's external, supporting USB3, and does BD-25, and DVD. The advantage of the external over SATA is that you can attach to PC, Mac, Laptop, whatever. The advantage of BD + DVD is you can give DVD discs to friends/family/clients who may not have a bluray drive.

That does seem like a decent option... but make yourself a book too.

I am very heavy on good backups, but have not thought about "Preservation" so to speak. Yes electronic media is good and I have all my computers backed up on external hard drives and then the cloud for extra protection. But something for "Preservation" should not include media formats that likely won't be around 20 years from now. Something hard that can be held in the hand and requires nothing (like electricity) but looking at it is the way to go.

I am going to have to think about putting a book together. That is a marvelous idea.

My suggestion.

Survive for 2-3 years with HDD \ External HDD Backups or more powerful solution (RAID architecture for backup) then CLOUD everything ;) in 2-3 years the space will be enough

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Originally Posted by Joel Eade

I am not a great or famous photographer and my work has no significance to most of the world

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Well Joel that is your own fault because your work is of a quality that you could be if you presented and promoted yourself properly. It no doubt takes quit a bit of work.

I to have heard that digital files will degrade over time, but it is a very long duration. So do photographs. When printing I have been using archival quality paper, like Canon Pro Platinum , it claims a 200 year lifespan.

I neglect this, I should print more often.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...oto_Paper.html

HD, that 200 years is if printed from a Pro-1 or Pro-10, not a Pro-100 (different ink processes) and stored in UV/humidity controlled environment, blah, blah, blah.... ie: You probably won't see a 200 year lifespan unless nobody ever views your prints... and in that case, nobody will care that it lasted 200 years.

Digital IS bad though. I can't read 5 1/4" floppy C-64 formatted disks (Early 80s), 3 1/2" Amiga formatted disks (Late 80s, Early 90s), 5 1/4", or 3 1/2" FAT16 (Win/DOS, Early 80s-90s) formatted disks, IOMEGA Bernoulli disks (Mid to late 80s), IOMEGA zip disks (90s), IDE (PATA) hard disks (80s-00s), or SCSI hard disks(80s-90s).

Early CD-ROMs have likely decayed to unreadability if the web is to be believed. Early DVDs may be unreadable too. I can still read SATA drives, USB flash sticks, CDROMs, DVDs. I can upgrade to support BluRay. I can USB dongle my way into support for IDE (PATA) drives, and maybe even FAT 16 floppies.

So, digital tends to get unreadable within 20 years (though digital is in it's infancy... perhaps it will improve). And yet, prints of my early childhood (70s), before computers were personal, are all still viewable. Prints from my parents' childhoods are still viewable too!

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Originally Posted by Joel Eade

...I thought my kids/grandkids etc might someday like to look back at my images.

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It makes me rahter sad, but I expect if my kids/grandkids someday look back at my images they will no doubt compare unfavorably, sentimental value notwithstanding, to the cerebrally-projected 3D video holograms of the day. Kind of like comparing your amazing images to cave paintings...

http://jrid.com/blog/wp-content/uplo...e-painting.jpg

I do use the Pixma Pro series that would give said quality.

Researching my family history I found a picture online of my Great Great Grandmother and Grandfather who passed in 1877. I think it would be interesting for relatives to see you or your work 140 years later.

There is a problem with printing books and making albums. They do not duplicate well for later generations.

For that matter I didn't even know my GG Grandparents names until I started doing research. Come to find out there is a book written by a lady in Texas that researched my families genealogy. She did this because here mother felt like she didn't have many relatives. She started with the GGG Grandfather. I say this to make the point that by my generation there were hundreds if not thousands of descendants of the GGG Grandfather. When someone passes usually there is one copy of the pictures and no doubt one person takes them. When my Mom and Dad passed I made sure I had all of our families videos. Other pictures were divided up by who was in it. I have no pictures of any generation past my Grandparents and I have few of them.

A digital file is much easier to share. Every generation could share it with every sibling, if it didn't degrade.

Thanks for all the input and nice words about my images too. I have an Epson 3800 that prints with pigment based inks reported to have extreme longevity and I could print a portion of my images which would be a good idea. As a long term project I suppose I could print many images but it would be very expensive. The archival quality paper is high and one set of ink cartridges is $420:rolleyes:

Also producing a book would be fun and I am flattered that you guys think my work is publishable. I have not thought of that and (as mentioned) I have done zero marketing or promotion. I would not know where to start but it's certainly something to consider.

I am very interested in long term (at least the next 40-50 years) preservation of the entire collection as well. I think I am going to try the M-disc.

Prints are good for preservation. For the files I keep current files on computer, in Raid, backing up to an external Raid drive that is offsite. Keepers are backed up online in two cloud storage locations as well.
Will go with the consensus that you may want to look at publishing a book or two.

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Originally Posted by jrw

Will go with the consensus that you may want to look at publishing a book or two.

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Plus, if you make a book, you can add "Published Author" to your resume! :-D

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Originally Posted by jamsus

Survive for 2-3 years with HDD \ External HDD Backups or more powerful solution (RAID architecture for backup) then CLOUD everything ;) in 2-3 years the space will be enough

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Sorry, but RAID is absolutely, positively NOT a backup solution. It is simply a way to have one particular storage set survive a drive failure. If a natural event strikes the RAID set, it's just as dead as the next drive. And cloud will struggle to keep up with the needs of photographers, particularly with respect to upload bandwidth.

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Originally Posted by Sean Setters

Plus, if you make a book, you can add "Published Author" to your resume! :-D

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That would be kinda cool!

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Originally Posted by peety3

Sorry, but RAID is absolutely, positively NOT a backup solution. It is simply a way to have one particular storage set survive a drive failure. If a natural event strikes the RAID set, it's just as dead as the next drive. And cloud will struggle to keep up with the needs of photographers, particularly with respect to upload bandwidth.

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I've been doing quite okay with cloud backup... I have about 1.4 TB on CrashPlan right now. The upload speed is about 1.5 GB/hour, so when I come home from a major trip and have 500 GB to deal with, yes it could take a while. But who needs to back everything up? At least 95% of the photos I take are junk, so once I do a purge, the cloud backup works just fine. For example on my last bear trip to British Columbia I took 20,000 images. I've pared them down to just over 800, and I could slash even further if I wanted to.

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Originally Posted by peety3

Sorry, but RAID is absolutely, positively NOT a backup solution. It is simply a way to have one particular storage set survive a drive failure. If a natural event strikes the RAID set, it's just as dead as the next drive. And cloud will struggle to keep up with the needs of photographers, particularly with respect to upload bandwidth.

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Perhaps you wouldn't mind sharing what you do consider to be an effective backup strategy? I ask as RAID storage is part of my redundant drives in multiple locations plan for backup.

Well my first backup solution was to use archive grade DVDs.

I would use the backup catalog feature in Photoshop and burn a new set of DVDs once a year. I would also do a quarterly incremental backup.

Unfortunately some years back it stopped working, never did workout why.

Have had a NAS for many years so what I would do is backup my PC (this contains all of my images) to the NAS. Since this NAS was also mirrored to a second NAS everything was safe (that's 3 copies).

The ideal system would be to use the cloud. The only problem in Australia is that we not only have bandwidth caps, but we also have usage caps. This means that you need to be rich to be able to afford Cloud backup.

Upload bandwidth and rates are the worst part which means that this would never be a viable option for me:(

Multiple copies....

Source data on my main computer, managed with Lightroom in year folders, data gets migrated every few years when I buy a new bigger hard drive. Second copy of all my source files on a RAID box connected via ESATA. Third copy on an external hard drive stored at mums away from my house.

I then have my developed photos, I keep a key set on my computer, a copy goes on my RAID box, another copy on the hard drive at mums, another on my personal USB drive I carry with me to work, plus each photo uploaded to Flickr.

My source data is good up to a nuke going off over Sheffield, my developed photos are good whilst ever we have electricity !

Good to see everyone's varied backup plans.

Currently I have a separate hard-drive (internal) on my PC with all my photos and that hard-drive is mirrored to a desktop external hard-drive continuously. I also have two external hard-drives which I periodically back-up everything to and keep at two separate locations (my parents house and the office). And for any photos I print (mostly family shots), the jpgs are backed up on-line with the printer.

I think that is reasonably good, but this thread has me looking into something more permanent as I understand hdd's don't last forever. I like the idea of the m-discs and may implement backing up to several blu-ray discs every so often.

Stephen

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Originally Posted by jrw

Perhaps you wouldn't mind sharing what you do consider to be an effective backup strategy? I ask as RAID storage is part of my redundant drives in multiple locations plan for backup.

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Multiple geographically-dispersed copies, period. One copy at my parents' house, 4 miles by helicopter, 5 miles by car, accessible even when our little town becomes an island during flooding. One copy at my office, 8 miles by helicopter, 14 miles by car, brick building. One copy at my in-laws, 1700 miles by helicopter, 2100 miles by car, concrete exterior walls. 4TB drive handles our archives from 1999 to mid-2010. They don't change, so the backup volumes will remain at their offsite locations undisturbed. 4TB drive handles our archives from mid-2010 to now. At the moment, I'm using a fleet of 7 2TB drives for backups. Three of those handle mid-2010 to mid-2014; those also don't change (except for rare re-edits), so the backup drives remain in place. Four of those handle mid-2014 to present. One sits at home, gets updated every two weeks, and is shuttled to alternating sites as the opportunity presents.

As much as Lloyd Chambers of DigLloyd/Mac Performance Guide annoys me, he's got a lot of great ideas to share. One of these is to always partition your RAID arrays into 4TB volumes, so the backup process is more manageable. He's definitely onto something.

Personally, I'd be scared of using a RAID array as any one (or more) of my offsite backups. That array, in almost all cases, needs to be kept as a concise, undisturbed unit, potentially mated to either a hardware RAID card, hardware RAID chassis, or OS/RAID driver/toolset.

For at least the past 3 years, whenever I've come upon a need to grow my home storage solution, I've contemplated a RAID array, and I just can't swallow the cost. I can use a simple, single SSD for scratch work, with simple 'rsync' to two adjacent HDDs for short-term local triplication, and get great performance from Lightroom etc. Once the job is finished, I sync it to my home archive, and delete from the SSD. I sync to one of the offsite drives, and delete from the first HDD. I swap the offsite drive with one at the office/parents, sync to the returned drive, and delete from the other HDD. Tedious, yes a bit, but the only place that RAID would make a difference (to me) would be at home, to avoid the local HDD sync/deletions.

A few things, since Joel's original question was generational. So I guess we are talking 80 years plus.

I have read about Data Degradation, if you are saving in multiple locations how much of a problem would it really be over the long haul?

How about archiving photos? Of course we all make JPG's for viewing, but how about our digital negatives and raw files?
Who is to say that Windows 20 will even be compatible with a program that would handle CR2 files. Is there a base negative file we could convert RAW in to that would for sure be available in the future?

Unlike film negatives of the past which was put on a medium and remains on a medium, our medium is forever evolving and changing. Negatives of the past still exist as tangible objects. Where are photos exist as data on a computer that is continually upgraded, and to save our files we will continually be saving them on new computers and storage devices. The oldest digital pictures I have saved are from 1999 and they have been on at least 5 or 6 different machines, probably more. I have video from the same time frame shot with a webcam, I am unable to view it now. How will our digital pictures fair in 50 years after going through dozens if not hundreds of formats and memory transfers?

Trying to determine what file format(s) will be in use even 10 years from now is not possible. Having seen changes in file formats over the years I can also say that conversion programs have kept up with it. In the event of camera systems that are now gone, Contax 645 for me with an incredibly obsolete Kodak digital back, the original raw files are still editable in Adobe and Capture One software. No doubt in other software I don't have as well. At any time I can press a button and convert to a current format. As long as you are aware and check with new versions of software for compatibility there is no reason, nor excuse, that the files can not be migrated to new formats to keep up with changes.
Negatives and prints are not forever either. The emulsions and print media do degrade, chemical reactions continue which change colours, storage conditions are seldom ideal, fires and floods happen, people throw out old boxes when cleaning up estates.
All you can do is deal with it as it evolves and not obsess with future proofing which you can't do anyways.
For orphaned video files I would suggest checking out the converters from NCH and DVD Video Soft if you don't have access to PremierePro or other video editing software. I know other folks who didn't keep on top of format changes, video has been rather bad for that, and were able to convert successfully.