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Life of Digital Photo on CD?

PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2010 4:21 pm
by nader
How long do digital photos saved to a CD live? I recently heard that after only 5 years the quality of the photos begin to deteriorate. I do have pictures on CD that are 6.5 years old and they still seem to be ok.

PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2010 4:57 pm
by Gator
This thread got me wondering. Originally manufacturers claimed between 50 and 200 years. I just read that cheap burned data could begin deteorating in as little as 2 years! I have thousands of photos "archived" on CD and DVD. This has me worried. More research needed.

PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2010 5:34 pm
by Jabberwocky
Recently, I was intrigued to hear a claim of 1,000 year dvds.

However, they're cost prohibitive for many of us.

Archival DVD by Cranberry Carves Your Memories in Stone
http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/ ... 01890.html

"Mountains are stone, and they preserve the best memories..."

PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2010 5:57 pm
by coldfoot
The quality of the photos isn't going to deteriorate. The storage medium is going to deteriorate. In practice with digital media that usually means it will either be fine, or unreadable, not in-between.

Burned CD-R are different from pressed CDs from the 80s but burned CD-R seem to last a long time. Your worry with all digital storage media should be not only is the medium OK, but incompatibility: will you have a drive that can read it and can be attached to your future computer and understand the filesystem format. It should take a long time before incompatibility renders CD drives unfindable, but almost certainly a 1000-year DVD is pointless. If you store data on a hard drive, it's not a bad idea to copy them onto a new hard drive every several years to keep up with interface incompatibility - for example, imagine if you put data on SCSI drives last decade, now you'd be looking around for a SCSI card and a computer to use it in. This can render storage media un-useful before the device/media itself fails.

PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2010 6:49 pm
by Buz Groshong
coldfoot wrote:The quality of the photos isn't going to deteriorate. The storage medium is going to deteriorate. In practice with digital media that usually means it will either be fine, or unreadable, not in-between.

Burned CD-R are different from pressed CDs from the 80s but burned CD-R seem to last a long time. Your worry with all digital storage media should be not only is the medium OK, but incompatibility: will you have a drive that can read it and can be attached to your future computer and understand the filesystem format. It should take a long time before incompatibility renders CD drives unfindable, but almost certainly a 1000-year DVD is pointless. If you store data on a hard drive, it's not a bad idea to copy them onto a new hard drive every several years to keep up with interface incompatibility - for example, imagine if you put data on SCSI drives last decade, now you'd be looking around for a SCSI card and a computer to use it in. This can render storage media un-useful before the device/media itself fails.


I'm not worried. All of mine are backed up on floppies! :wink: