Is Digital Archival?
Prints are still being made from Ansel Adams' negatives that are over sixty years old because they are inherently archival.
Will the same be true of digital files?
Will your children and grandchildren be able to look through a box of your digital files sixty years from now? Will the media be readable, and will there be anything to read it with?
The answer is NO if you’ve been using Sony’s AIT drives to archive and backup your files because they are being discontinued.
For over a decade, tape has been a primary archive and backup media for many IT professionals. It is considered by many to have a longer archival shelf life than hard drives. Up until the last year or two, tape was also cheaper per GB than hard drives, although that is no longer true. I suspect that the price drop in hard drive storage, coupled with new storage approaches have caused IT professionals to change their buying patterns.
In practical terms, what this means is that if you are using AIT, you need to immediately find a new backup media. It also means that it’s only a matter of time before you won’t have a drive available to read your archive of AIT Tapes. Your archive essentially just got reset to zero, because you’ll only be able to access it for as long as you can scrounge up drives on Ebay. Basically you need to rebuild your archive all over again if you’ve been using AIT tapes.
It’s becoming clear that digital files are not an archival medium, and that it takes constant investment to protect your archive in even an imperfect way. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences realizes this. They’ve calculated that it’s less expensive and more archival to write digital movies to B&W separation negatives than it is to store a digital copy. In fact, they claim there is no archival digital storage method at all!!! Yikes!
All this makes the Millenniata/Cranberry archival DVDs a whole lot more interesting, but at 4.7 GB per disk, it’s not a efficient way to back up terabytes of files. And even if the media last as long as they claim, there’s still the problem of finding a reader that can read it 25+ years from now, and the cost of $16 per blank disk.
What’s my point? That we are constantly in danger of losing our digital photographs because there is no archival storage medium that we can be sure will be readable one hundred years from now. With my own eyes, I’ve seen the negative that makes Ansel Adam’s photograph Clearing Winter Storm, made in approximately 1939, and it’s still readable with the naked eye, and can be put into an enlarger and printed.
To achieve the same thing with digital we have to have media that doesn’t degrade, we need devices to read it, and we need software that still works with Windows 2070 SP6. No one has solved this one yet. Until someone does, make prints, which will be readable for a long time to come.
posted by Rich Seiling at
11/12/2009
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8 Comments:
Rich, I think you're mixing a few concepts here that may confuse the issue. Digital files are not a medium (archival or otherwise); they are quite literally a bunch of numbers. The medium they are stored on can be magnetic (e.g. tape, hard drives,) optical, or other.
Also, we should not confuse storage solutions for home use with digital archives maintained in larger organizations (corporations, museums, etc.) where storage is to a large extent virtualized. The data is independent of the technology it happens to live on at a given time. As better storage solutions are created, data can be migrated seamlessly and with no loss of quality. Such solutions are becoming available to home users as well via some online image archiving services.
60 years is really not that long, and though negatives may well survive much longer than that when stored properly, they are ultimately transient. You cannot duplicate them without loss of quality. I'm sure Adams' negatives are archived digitally somewhere to protect his work from the inevitable deterioration of his original film.
Guy
Hi Guy, and thanks for your comments!
This post is a drive-buy on a large issue, and there is a lot more to explain. I'll see if I can't answer your questions in a future post.
Maybe the new model for archiving is going to be the periodic transfer of digital files from older storage media to newer (sort of like the way artisan cheese cultures are preserved in Europe). This is certainly what libraries are doing. In the microcosm of my own single-user digital lab, I have been doing this since the beginning. About every three years I buy a new set of larger capacity external drives; I started with a set of 120 GB drives, then replaced them with 250s, then 650s, then 1TB drives. In a year or so I will be moving to 2 TB drives.
I don't believe in storing anything permanently other than software on internal drives. That way, you have plenty of scratch disk space for optimum software performance. But, more importantly, if your machine crashes and becomes un-bootable, as my old PC did last week, you haven't lost anything. I simply connected my external drives to a Mac and kept going.
My archive system works like this: one external is the "Photo Master Drive." All file editing takes place there. A second external drive is the mirror backup of the first. A third external drive is kept off-premises (at home) and brought in for monthly updates. I use the internal drive to upload new shoots, where I go through and delete an average of 70 percent of the original RAW exposures. Then I move a nice, clean block of data- the keepers- to their semi-permanent home on the Photo Master Drive and import them into Lightroom. This culling process is indispensable for conserving disk space and improving the quality of what is saved, making it much easier to go through and select images for printing a a later date.
The US Library of Congress (LoC) has been working this issue for some time.
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/
Migration is the key. Digital media such as tape, hdd, CD, DVD are not considered archival by LoC. If migration occurs before the media degrades your good. Otherwise...
Prints, as Rick points out, will last for some time and are considered archival these days, if you use the proper inksets and storage.
But how do you know when “no degradation has occurred" so that you can make your copy before degradation occurs? That's the rub, and why it’s not archival.
My film in a filing cabinet is going to be readable for decades, if not longer. My files might have just had enough bit rot in the last five minutes to make them unreadable, since the digital media is not archival.
Also, for migration to succeed, it must make a bit perfect copy of every file (hundreds of thousands of files!) that can be opened and read. Doing a standard copy with Mac or Windows does not do this!
The tools available to 99% of us don’t let us guarantee successful migration without tremendous effort that is impractical.
Migration is part of the answer, the other part is software that lets us do it with a much higher success rate than current off the shelf software lets us.
Then there is the media. You either need to use a widely adopted standard which may not be that archival (CD, DVD, Hard Drive) or risk not being able to access the data when the drives are no longer available to read it. And with tapes, you’ll need the software to access the data, and it will have to work on the operating systems available in 2025, unless you kept a working computer with a current operating system alive for the next 15 years. These things aren’t impossible with large sums of money and time, but they are not practical for the typical user, not in the same way putting a piece of film in a filing cabinet is.
For long term storage, prints are an option, but I don’t want to have to scan my print in 15 years to use that image file, I want to be able to open it as a file.
Rich is absolutely right. This is a horrible problem. It's just too new to really manifest itself very widely. There are several very serious issues:
1) The physical devices used to store the image files. Those devices get discontinued and go obsolete very quickly.
2) The standards the devices are built with. Standards like IDE (already effectively defunct), SATA (recently upgraded to SATA II), etc. etc. Very few of these standards for hardware have stood the test of time (time being decades)
3) Operating systems. There are plenty of old programs around, some that used to be quite popular, that ran fine in Windows98 but won't run in WindowsXP or higher.
4) The digital file formats themselves. Minolta digital file formats went obsolete as soon as Minolta exited the digital camera business. How long Adobe and other companies will support those files is anyone's guess. And the probably answer is not "for 100 years."
#4 is complicated by the fact that even within a single manufacturer, the camera file formats differ between camera models. How long Nikon D40 or Canon 20D file formats will be supported is, again, anybody's guess.
It's a serious problem, and literally the only answer for most of us who aren't major corporations is to do continual upgrade and migration to new platforms and media. And then, when the file formats for our images are no longer supported, transfer them to a more generic format like DNG.
As for enlargers, there are so few of those around nowadays and so little film being used that people will have to line up one day just to use the handful of enlargers that still exist. And may have to mix their own chemicals to develop prints from them.
It's a serious issue, one that painters don't face (they face other issues) and one we need to take seriously to avoid winding up in a real lurch like some people did who ventured into digital in the beginning and now are stuck with 100s or 1000s of files in now-extinct formats that can't be read any more.
>>But how do you know when “no degradation has occurred" so that you can make your copy before degradation occurs? That's the rub, and why it’s not archival.
Neither is film. Neither are prints. The reality is that no medium - or file format - exists today that is guaranteed to preserve photographs for 500 years, or for 1000s of years, like the works of Michaelangelo or the cave paintings of ancient societies. Gelatin, ink and paper are all inherently volatile.
Digital capture, in fact, is in theory the only medium ever created that can be truly 100% archival indefinitely (and yes for any practical purpose a digital file is a medium, it's just not one that needs to be tied to i.e., stored on, some specific physical source).
In practice, however, one needs to be continually diligent about transfering the digital information over time in a way that keeps the file readable by some device of whatever day the file is needed.
So Rick is absolutely right regarding the severity of the problem re: digital image preservation. But digital is also the only solution we know of that has the potential to preserve photographs indefinitely.
Just a quick observation. Right now, JPEG and TIFF seem to be the most widely used and supported digital file formats. Both have been around a lot longer than any raw file format and are supported by more applications, cameras, readers, etc. than any raw file format. Saving a high-res JPEG or TIFF for one's most important images is a very good idea, especially for finished, processed final images. Doesn't take a huge amount more space yet provides at least some future-proofing. They still need to be transferred to new media periodically, though, for the reasons already shared above.
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