Ars longa, vita brevis…

Posted by Steve Hull on Monday 12 September 2011 at 10:43am
Tags: digital preservation |

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Cave Paintings, Hand Prints, 12,000 to 10,000 years old / Ryan Somma / CC BY-SA 2.0

It was ostensibly about the Dear Photograph website, where people are invited to post photos of older photos held up in the original locations where they were taken.  The results can be quite powerful and a similar approach was taken last year to illustrate places in Britain bombed during the war.

But the main intention of the article was to give another much-needed reminder of just how easy it is to lose digital media forever.  Physical media certainly aren't perfect -- the nitrate stock used for virtually all moviemaking up until 1951 is unstable (not to mention highly flammable) and is the major reason that around half of all films shot on nitrate (and something like 80 per cent of all pre-1930 films) have been lost.  But, properly looked after, physical media can last a very long time.  There are obvious examples such as vellum manuscripts, oil paintings and the Dead Sea Scrolls.  But more "modern" physical media also have the potential for long life.  The first photograph ever taken is still viewable, if not in perfect condition, and there are tremendous numbers of daguerreotypes, calotypes, wet places, dry plates and other photographic records of the 19th century.  The first audio recording is also listenable, and, again, numerous recordings exist on wax and vinyl.  The first magnetic recording (on a drum, not a tape) is in fine shape after more than a century.  Even much-maligned analogue tape (both audio and video) has proven to be quite resilient (with some important reservations) and can remain usable decades and decades after it was first recorded -- if stored properly, of course.

For digital media, however, the prospects are not so bright, for three reasons.  First of all, digital media don't degrade in a gradual manner.  An analogue recording that gets a scratch sounds like an analogue recording with a scratch; a digital recording with a scratch may be completely unplayable unless you have specialised means of recovering the usable data.  Second, the far greater storage capacity of digital media paradxoically means that the danger of loss is greater: if a 4x6 photograph is destroyed you've lost that photograph, but if an 8 GB memory stick with 50,000 photos on it is destroyed...

But the third and perhaps most important reason is the actual medium that we store digital data on.  Tape, as mentioned above, is still quite good if handled properly, but tape is not much used, at least in the consumer world.  Hard disk drives are designed with a lifespan of 5 years.  Home-recorded CDs and DVDs shouldn't be expected to survive more than 2 years unless you've spend a lot of money on archival quality media.  Memory sticks are harder to attach a lifspan to, but some manufacturers only guarantee them for 5 years, so it would be unwise to expect better.

So what to do?  Three words: refreshing, replication and retro.  Refreshing: remember (or better yet schedule) to copy your data to new media every few years.  Replication: make sure you have redundant copies of your data -- and store them in different locations: having a backup copy on the shelf next to the originals isn't much good when your house burns down.  And finally, retro: if you have precious photographs, get them printed on good old photographic paper.  Then, in 20 or 30 years, you can hold them up in the place where they were originally taken, make a new photograph and submit it to Dear Photograph...

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