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.

Director's Data Stolen

In the ongoing saga of coming to terms with the need to secure our digital photographs and other important data, let us consider the case of famous Director Francis Ford Coppola “who just lost 15 years of computer data, including writings and family photographs, when robbers raided his Argentine studio” according to this AP article.

“Coppola appealed to the bandits to return the small computer backup device, which was taken along with computers in the raid Wednesday night.”

"They stole our computers; they got all our data, many years of work," said Coppola. "If I could get the backup back, it would save me years — all the photographs of my family, all my writing."

The lesson to be learned here?
Not only do you need a backup, but you need a current copy in a separate location (mom’s house, safe deposit box, etc) at all times to protect against theft, fire, tornado, flood, earthquake...you name it, or you’ll be making the same laments Coppola is. If he had had an backup in a separate location, you'd never be reading this.