Stored under constant temperature within Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania, USA, in thousands of boxes, crates and shelving is the last two hundred years of recorded music, text and photographs of the human race. The American Photographic and Media Archives hold literally millions of analogue and digitized images in frigid suspended animation.
Unfortunately, most of the digitized photographic images inside Iron Mountain are just about impossible to read. The equipment used to read them has broken down and spare parts are not available, the technology superseded, or, simply discarded years ago. Therefore, the image data remains tied up in a multitude of defunct and unreadable media formats.
The rest of the Iron Mountain archive is composed of film media. All types, glass negatives, plastic negatives, transparencies and of course, developed photographs. While the fragility of old film stock is a concern, the trade-off is its extraordinary life span. Photographs that are over a hundred years old are still usable.
Film is stable, reliable and has a Life Expectancy (LE), rating of greater than 300 years for run-of-the-mill stock, and up to 500 years for archive standard microfilm.
The American stock photo company, Corbis, is the owner of Iron Mountain and Microsoft owns Corbis. Contrary to the company's penchant for digitization, old negatives and photographs are preserved on microfilm or kept in their original state. No digital conversion used, except for cataloging purposes. It appears that photographic memories are best-archived using film.
Ever since the start of the Information Revolution, the last thirty years or so, technology has allowed us to digitize images and store the data in progressively smaller physical spaces. Images are coded and encrypted into binary representations until it becomes a matrix of bits and bytes stored on some medium that needs special technology to decode it, before the image can be seen once again.
While all of this is good for efficient use of space, the greatest challenge is to find a future-proof method of preserving an image. The method, regardless of age or technological advances, needs to allow viewing of the original image without complex electronic hardware or the latest revision of some flaky imaging software. The system is already here and proven. It is the best form of image media storage developed by humans so far, the humble photographic film negative and the associated paper photograph.
Use film if you want to record and preserve historical events.
Digital imagery has created on the one hand, the convenience of instant image making, while on the other, the problem of long-term image retention. Over the decades, people have tried many different ways of retaining a memory. Images have been converted into bits and bytes in all sorts of media, for example: punched tape, punched cards, magnetic tapes, eight-track cartridges, hard disc packs, hard discs, floppy discs, ROM cards, PROM cards, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-R's, and the list is growing.
Every year hundreds of pages of text, photographs and audio data are lost due to superseded technologies. Our digital memories, while quick and easy to create, are elusive to retain and even harder to preserve. We are forced to get with the times, to move on, go digital and abandon film. Film photography has served us perfectly well for decades, and allowed us to keep a highly stable and long-lived record of a critical moment in time. Suddenly it is old fashioned.
As we move towards digital-only photography, some of us assume that the images taken, will remain for decades, but will they. How long will that memory last?
If you use digital technology, backup your digital files, every three to five years to at least two places, maintaining physical separation.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
Newer technology does not seem to guarantee a long life expectancy. In fact, life expectancy is roughly inversely proportional to the age of the technology. Every time you take a photograph, consider the real life of that image. Will you have it for long enough to show your grandchildren?
Most digital photographers use a computer hard disk to backup their images. If this is the only place you store your precious memories, you could be in trouble. The life expectancy of a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is a concern. Researchers use a statistical abbreviation called Mean Time between Failures or (MTBF) to provide Life Expectancy ratings. Some researchers advise that just average use of a computer with a HDD gives a MTBF of somewhere in the order of three to five years. This is not a case of if, but when, will your disc crash.
You can expect a hard disc failure at least once in the life of an average computer. Therefore, to be safe you need a backup system to cover that eventuality. Save digital images onto a Compact Disc-recordable (CD-R). Theoretically this should preserve your images for anywhere between 5 to 25 years.
