Archival Storage?

Here’s a shot taken with the Vivitar 3800 body and the Pentax 135mm lens on Kodak Portra 400 film. I set it at f8 and 1/250 to capture the interesting patterns made by this bare tree against the cloudy sky.

If you “Google” archival storage” or “archival photo storage” what you will find is a plethora of photo albums and boxes that promise an acid free environment to help preserve your photographs for posterity. You may also find some similar things for your negatives. What you will not find is any help with storing and preserving your digital photo files. There is a reason for this glaring deficiency. There are none.

I was reading an article a few days ago where the author was arguing that one of the advantages of film photography is that it frees you from having to invest the time and money necessary to become a well-equipped computer Geek. I might add that for those of us who make our living on our computers and are fully invested in Facebook, Twitter, Blogging and the like, it is refreshing to have hobbies that take us away from the computer screen. Alas, even film photography today does not really fulfill this need anymore.

The first thing the lab does after processing my film is scan it into a digital file. If I want prints they are printed from the scan, and of course I just have to have copies of the scans along with my prints and negatives so I can upload them to my computer, my blog and yes, at times Facebook. I have whined about this situation (that even analog images are really not analog anymore) in previous posts so I won’t belabor the point here.

The real problem is that while I have multiple ways and methods to insure my prints and negatives will be around for my kids and grandkids to enjoy I have no such assurances for my scanned digital files. Many people think that once digital files are saved to their computer everything is just wonderful. Those of us who have suffered a hard drive crash know that is certainly not true. 

Some people are more conscientious and have back-ups of their digital files either on CD’s, DVD’s or external drives. While this is to be commended it is not the solution either as all digital storage media is subject to failure and degradation of data over time. And all of these do in fact fail on a routine basis.

The last time I checked the only long term digital storage media that was accepted by the National Archives and Records Administration for long term storage was magnetic tape and it was only approved provided a rigorous procedure was followed to make sure the tape was kept in an environmentally controlled, magnetically neutral storage area, tested periodically for data degradation and rewritten, or copied, to new tape on a regular schedule.

Consideration also has to be given to the format of the data and conversion from time to time to make sure it remains compatible with hardware and software development and changes.  Pictures and negatives from 100 years ago are still perfectly fine but I have Wordstar files created on DOS machines just 25 or 30 years ago still stored on my back up drives that I can’t access anymore because the programs that created them and the computers that ran them are both obsolete. With the current exponential evolution of digital technology in a few years Windows may once again just be something you look through and jpeg files could become as obsolete as my old Wordstar files.

So what is the solution? I don’t know, but I do back up my data files religiously and try to stay up with technology in the hope that I will be able to convert my pictures to whatever new format comes along to keep them viable and usable. I maintain three copies of all my files at any given time. One is on my computer hard drive and the others are on high quality external drives. I highly recommend you do something similar if you value your digital pictures. 

And while you’re at it – don’t forget your negatives and photos either. A shoe box is okay for a while but a fire proof lock box is better long term security. Remember, whether their analog or digital your pictures are irreplaceable.