Somewhere I have a 5.25" floppy with some files of (slight) interest but it was written by an Apple II with a Z80 coprocessor running CP/M. Even if the disc is pristine I doubt that format is readable by any current machine.

Hey, that brings back memories. I was president of the hardware division at Digital Research many years ago. Digital Research was founded by Gary Kildall who wrote CP/M (which was then "used" to make QDOS which Gates purchased from Seattle Computing for $50,000 in order to sell MS-DOS to IBM who then re-labled it as PC-DOS, now known as simply DOS). Anyway, Microsoft very cleverly built a CP/M coprocessor for the Apple II and by doing so, managed to co-opt CP/M in the nascent "microcomputer" market (later called the desktop computer). We came to the market really late and decided to defend our turf with our own board that we purchased from Jack Tseng, who had just founded Tseng labs, later to be known for all sorts of video boards. It was the best CP/M board of the three on the market (another from ALS), but the world had moved on by that point and CP/M was effectively dead.

OK, enough about memory lane. If you want to read that disc, pretty much any 5.25" drive should work. If you have one of those, I am sure you will be able to find, somewhere on the Internet, a really old program that was designed to read CP/M discs under DOS. Now, I am making a leap of faith here, but I assume that the command line in WinXP (type "CMD" from the Run box) can still exec these old programs. If so, you should be good to go without having to purchase any strange hardware other than the 5.25" drive. Or, if you have an old DOS floppy, just boot the computer on that, run the CP/M disk reader program, and transfer the files to a DOS 3.25" floppy.

I just stripped some of my older computers, all of which I still equipped with 5.25" drives when I bought them back in the 1990s, and I am keeping those drives in a closet, just in case.

If you really want that data read, you could send it here and I could probably do what I describe above in order to retrieve the data. Also, I have archived all my old DOS utilities, and I am pretty sure I have one or more of those old CP/M disk reader programs which will run under DOS.

The Internet is a strange and wonderful thing! I lift a glass in memory of CP/M. Thanks for all the tips, if I come across that 5.25" disc again I'll try it out.

Worrying about the longevity of BluRay discs is like telling a man with two weeks to live that he's won the lottery.

The issue (and this is ABSOLUTELY certain) is not the longevity of the medium. It's the data that's at risk.

In 1997 (wow 11 years ago!) I produced an interactive CD rom for Citibank. Won a gold award in the Houston FF for it.

It cost about $200k to produce. It was wonderful.

Like to see it???
Sorry - it was programmed in Windows 95. I did upgrade it to 98, but once XP came in the authoring "projector" no longer worked.

History shows us that the greatest artists are the ones who's work stood the test of time. If you didn't gesso your canvas correctly the colors faded.

We are living through the greatest revolution in the history of mankind in media production, storage and communication. In the early '90s I used to say that more people had seen my work (national TV commercials) than had seen DaVinci's.

No more - the internet has made all media instantly available to all people.

But...
all of our efforts now depend on an entire civilization and technology to view. All you need to see DaVinci's paintings are your eyes. I need electricity, playback decks, codecs, monitors, speakers, etc., etc. etc.

And everything is changing at such a rapid rate, there is NO guarantee that you'll be able to play ANYTHING in 25 years. Upgrade it all?? Maybe. Who's got the time, the money, the equipment or even the interest to continue in this race.

All my friends are digitizing all their photos and throwing the originals away. I understand. It's great to have a whole colleciton on your iPod.

Solutions? I ain't got any.
But I sure don't worry about how long my BluRay discs are gonna last - fer sure.

v

Vic,

I addressed your issues in one of my earlier posts in this thread:

Format for Archiving

You are absolutely correct in your concern about what format will still be playable, and I have lot of similar stories to tell.

However, I think there is a pretty obvious solution for at least SOME of these things, and that is to use a format that is pretty much ubiquitous.

Thus, for pictures, I would use JPEG with little or no compression. The chance that this will be unreadable in twenty years is virtually nil because it is used for EVERYTHING. For text I would use ASCII, with RTF or the Word DOC being my choice if formatting was important (or PDF). For video, I'd use MPEG-2 as my first choice or DV AVI for slightly better quality. Not sure about what to do about storage for higher resolution.

I can go on, but the point is that you want to use a file format that is not in any way tied to a single application. Thus, storing a Vegas VEG file will be useless, because I doubt that Vegas will be around in even ten years. I probably wouldn't store video project in Premiere or Final Cut or Avid or any other format, but would instead use a simple interchange format, even if not everything is retained.

It's pretty clear some formats will last longer than others just from the momentum of widespread use. I also think data has a much better chance of being readable in X years if you use a fully open format (with open-source implementations) since these can be maintained even when Company Y discontinues the product or goes away completely. Not that they absolutely WILL be ported to new architectures, but at least it's possible. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious.

I won't belabor this point, but the big elephant in the room still is that the Flemish artists, the Renaissance guys and all the classics are over 300 years old.

What chance is there that ANYTHING I've created (and not printed out - on archival paper/ink no less) will be viewable in twenty-five years? 100? 300?

We are all carefully documenting every detail of our lives, in still and motion - why? Who will be able to see it? Who will care?

We are all carefully documenting every detail of our lives, in still and motion - why? Who will be able to see it? Who will care?Vic,

You are getting close to the big issue, but not quite there.

Will the bits on the disc last a long time? With the right media and correct storage, both testing and "early returns" on CDs stored for two decades seem to indicate the answer is yes.

Will equipment still be available to read these discs? That's tougher to answer, since some high-end formats only used by pros -- some of the early videotape, for instance -- is not easy to get or use. However, for a format which now has hundreds of millions of players, I don't think they will all disappear, unless civilization itself ceases.

Will the file format be readable? Almost certainly, if you use open formats, like JPEG or MPEG-2, etc.

However, the one thing no one has mentioned, and Vic got close:

Will anyone be able to FIND anything, and will anyone actually look at the billions of photos and years of video that we are creating?

It's not just whether anyone will care, because with billions of people on the planet, there is someone who has a fetish about just about anything. However, here's the thing:

I have only three photos of my great-grandparents; they are precious, worth saving, and easy to find because there were only three of them in a box that was part of only a handful of possessions they owned.

Moving up a generation, my grandparents had a few dozen photos, and again, they were easy to find.

But, moving up to "the greatest generation" (my parents, the WWII generation), I spent several years scanning all the photos from both my wife's parents and my parents, and I think the total was something close to 50,000 photos. I can remember many of these, but when I want to find a photo, it is almost impossible.

I have even more photos, plus I am now the curator for all the photos mentioned above.

But here's where the whole thing breaks down.

My daughter, who just turned twenty-one, has a digital still camera and, in just the time she has been at college (three years), has taken close to the number of photos as her four grandparents (my parents and my wife's parents) did in their entire lifetime.

Each of her photos has virtually no value compared to the four surviving photos of my great-grandparents and -- this is the main point -- even with all sorts of cataloging and searching software, no one is every going to be able to find anything and is certainly no one is never going to view 99% of any of those photos ever again.

I don't think the "finding a (photographic / video) needle in a haystack" problem is necessarily an impossible one to solve.

The internet is a very big place (and most of it is of little or no interest to me.) However, Google still manages to be quite useful in finding things.

However, Google still manages to be quite useful in finding things. True, but only if there is some text string to help. Without any text on the page with an image, try to find a way to get a picture that "looks like THIS picture," where you have a photo similar to the one you are looking for.

Can't do it.

Years ago (I met with them in 1996), a company called Virage tried to develop software that would do exactly this. It never quite worked.

There are a few things that could help. For instance, I have some shareware software called "ImageDupeless" that I bought several years ago which analyzes actual image content to try to find duplicate photos. It actually does find lots of duplicates, although it misses almost as many as it finds. I recommend it, but with reservations. "ThumbPlus" also has a "find duplicate" function that operates on actual image content, and it sometimes finds things which ImageDupeless misses (and vice versa).

However, AFIK, Google doesn't have any provision to search for images based on actual image content. Therefore, if there isn't a keyword on the page with the image, you'll never find that image.

Also, the second part of my point is that you will never be able to look at all the photos you've taken, given the explosion created by digital cameras.

Quick calculation:

You have 50,000 photos. You view each for five seconds. How long will it take to view them all?

50,000 x 5 = 250,000 seconds = 4,166 minutes = 69.5 hours !!

At eight hours in a working day, that will take almost nine working days -- close to two full working weeks -- to view all the photos that just one person has taken.

And, while I didn't mention it above, the explosion in moving images is even more spectacular. Very few people owned a movie camera back when that was the only way to capture motion, and even those that did seldom took more than a few hours of film over a lifetime (oh, was it ever expensive ...). Now, EVERYONE has a video camera (or still camera that can also take movies) and they take hours and hours of video each year.

Even people using Vegas don't always use the logging and media management features, and I can guarantee that most home videographers don't even label their tapes, other than perhaps some general title and date. So, most of the video being taken today is destined to be never viewed, not only because of the time it would take, but also because there is no way to search it.

As an entrepreneur, I can tell you that problems like the ones I outline above are the kind of stuff that fuels startups, so I hope a solution will soon be at hand.

So, now that we have video camcorders recording to hard drives and solid state cards, what do you use for long term archival storage? Solid state cards are at this point in time way too expensive and do not have enough capacity. Hard disks can do it but are subject to reliability issues even while sitting on the shelf. MiniDV tape is still my chosen method but this will soon become obsolete.... what is the consensus of opinion as to the best currently available method?

Hard disks can do it but are subject to reliability issues even while sitting on the shelf. MiniDV tape is still my chosen method but this will soon become obsolete.... what is the consensus of opinion as to the best currently available method? This is covered in dozens of other posts in this forum. Tape is clearly the favorite for longevity, and disk drives are probably the best for intermediate storage, simplicity, and -- if you buy them on sale -- they actually rival DVD in price/bit.

The hard drive failure issue is completely overblown, IMHO, although I'll admit to not having any information on what happens to a drive as it sits on a shelf for a decade or more.

Finally, if you really are concerned about backup, always make two copies, store them in different locations, and use different media for each backup.

Thanks Johnmeyer.

I did search the forum but was looking for a recent consensus. The question came about from a friend who just bought a consumer camcorder with avchd to a hard drive and was finding out that his laptop would not be a suitable place to backup. I suspect that most who buy HDD and solid state, (at least consumers), do not see in advance what a problem they have created by going that route as of today.

In 25 years of heavy hardware/software experience I have on more than one occasion seen a shelved hard disk fail to spin up after extended periods of time. In only a few years we have gone through ide, eide, sata, sata2, FAT32, NFTS, etc. which means that unless you opt for a USB external drive, 15 years from now you might have to buy a new card just to connect to an old hard drive!

I agree with multiple backups completely! But clearly, tape is the best method for archiving as of today. But the consumer who buys a hard drive or solid state camcorder today has no easy/cost effective way to convert to tape.