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Archival Storage for Digital Images

John

Yes that scanner is called F1 in Germany as well . I could not find any other information yet , except the technical data .
No German dealer is advertising at the moment . But that is no trouble for me at all . I will contact my MAC dealer on monday and ask him for the price and the availability . I will keep you informed .

Jürgen
 
Thanks Jürgen,

I forgot to ask you how you like your 1800f as I have no experience of Microtek.

I ask indulgence for this brief off topic chat.

John
P.S. I have now discovered how to make an umlaut ü and also a €.
 
John

The 1800f is a very good scanner and I never had any trouble with it .
I bought that scanner , to scan my 4x5 LF negatives and found the resolution is sufficient enough for that format . A friend of mine , who only works in LF 8x10 recommended that scanner . The resolution for 8x10 is more than good , although , of course the time brings scanners with higher resolution , regardless if needed or not .
This scanner is not built for MF or even 35mm , although , of course you can scan these formats , but you won't be happy with the results .
The F1 will have a resolution of 4800x9600 and that is as good as FLEXTIGHT X1 and X5 .
But the price is much , much lower . I do not want to compare quality as nobody knows yet .
But lets wait a while , and we will have results . Hopefully good ones .
Regards Jürgen ( the one with the Umlaut
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G'Day:

Back to topic. =:^)

Today, I got a 'begging' letter asking for another contribution to The Planetary Society. I've been a member for years, and the extra $$ request is not unusual. (Yep, I'm one of those strange people who support the space programs.) To make a long story short and get to the point. The two Pioneer interplanetary probes (launched 30+ years ago 1972 1973) are slowing down which violates the laws of physics (as we know them.) During the past year or so, The Planetary Society (working with NASA) has been able to gather/save all the radiometric doppler data collected to date. Unprecedented! The plan is to study the data for clues to the 'Pioneer Anamoly'.

Now, here's the point.

QUOTE "In assembling these data (from the last 30 years), scientists encountered a bewildering array of computer languages, recording media, data storage protocol, and physical deterioration of data records. ....every computer file has to be 'conditioned' before any work can be done ... only a handful of engineers know the old file formats (Fortran 66 etc) ... much of the old data conditioning needs obsolete DEC computers ... old mainframe computers ...legacy software ..." END QUOTE and so it goes on.

We're talking about JPL and NASA here.

(Just as a side note - the reason the Society has an interest ... scientists have already disproved obvious causes like solar wind or Kuiper Belt objects ... and recently in Switzerland, more than 35 of the world's top scientists failed to provide an answer. Have we misunderstood Newtonian physics?)

I thought the Forum may be interested in this only from the point of relevance to this topic. What is the plan for digital archiving. This topic has even been editorialised recently in the UK Amateur Photography mag. Their answer. New Hard Drives every year or so, always double hard drive back up, always keep old software when you upgrade etc etc etc. (Who said digital was cheaper than film?)

My negatives from 1972 are fresh. Will my digital files (at this stage only scans and print files) survive the next 30 years, and be readable.

Just wondering!
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Cheers,

Colin

PS I am not representing the society or seeking contributions.
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It should be possible for an affordable film printer to be manufactured (assuming one does not exist already) that could make very high resolution 6x6 transparencies from digital images. These could be stored as backups and would take up very little space. Perhaps, better still, colour separations might be even better from the point of view of archival longevity. I am being serious, actually. But this may have been implemented already.
 
Colin , mate

I believe the question you put up here can not be answered properly yet .
No modern media , like tape , hard disk , CD , DVD or optical disk can currently store data and images as cheap and good and long and space saving as "good old film" can .
And this consideration does not even include the software requirements .

Yes who said digital is cheaper than film ? ? ?
I found , that digital is much more expensive than film . But it is also much more comfortable to work the digital way .

Jurgen
 
G'Day Jurgen:

I can imagine that digital is much more comfortable to work with - multiple shots,instant feedback, no development and scanning etc. No doubt I will take that path soon enough.

As I said before here, for me, archival issues are irrelevant. I will be pushing up the daisies before that happens.
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But the new Dorothea Lange or Ansel Adams, or whomever, now 19 yrs old, somewhere, what will they do. Perhaps, like Bojan says, we'll find a good (automatic way) to make our 'winners' into hard copy?

I find it to be an interesting issue, which is now starting to raise its head even in the amateur snapshooter market. My neighbour with 3 young children has over 20 SD cards, and probably 20-40 DVDs of his kids! The oldest is not 10 yrs yet.

Cheers, Mate. BTW, love the heavy metal images.

Colin

(Meanwhile, solving the Pioneer Anomaly may prove that eventually Apples will fall upwards from the Tree...)

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The problem of archival is not without a solution. You just have to know what to do and keep on top of the issue. A bit of knowledge is all it takes.

In this respect, digital archival storage is not so different from film.

My father took lots of Kodachrome and Ektachrome throughout the 60s and 70s. But then he stored them in some old shoe boxes at the back of a cupboard. He lives in a hot, humid location. Today those films are covered in black dots, fungus lines and the colors have shifted horribly. He did not know about film's low humidity, cool storage requirements. I also live in a hot humd environment. But my film images are stored in archival pages in dehumidifying cabinets.

Digital archival problems are also caused by lack of knowledge. Many people made the change to digital and now store all their precious photos and family memories on a single hard disk on a computer that gets used for all sorts of purposes and therefore is liable to crashing and corruption.

But, if you select a widely-used uncompressed "standard' image format, store them in a logical fashion, backup to quality external media, store one set (at least) in another location and keep an eye on technology movements, the images should last for your lifetime, at least. If you want them to last beyond your lifetime you need to enlist the aid of someone (your child) who can carry them forward as media and formats change.

For now, I am using the uncompressed** TIF format, a hard disk backup and a set of DVD backups for my 350 gigabytes* of digital images. One day, I will definitely need to migrate to some other media (Blu-ray?) and maybe even convert the images from TIF to xyz format. But, I am confident that, as long as I don't leave it too late, that migration / conversion will always be possible.

A case in point is my image catalog. Today, it is in an Excel database. But, since I started a computer catalog it has been stored in several different databases, some of which have completely disappeared (e.g. Apple's HyperCard). But, there has always been an export / import option that enabled me to migrate the data. I have never had to retype any of the original data.

Yes, archival storage is an issue. But not a reason to avoid the benefits of digital.

Have faith in the technology...

Regards
Peter

* Even though I have only been capturing digitally, I have scanning my trannies for the last 8 years (100 Mb = 1 6x6cm tranny). Recently I hired a young photo student to work part time and work her way through my 25 year old collection of MF trannies to scan the better pre-scanner-era images.

** Avoiding any kind of compression, while requiring more media, is an important consideration in an archival strategy. The longevity of compression routines is uncertain. By the same token, any proprietary backup software that changes the format of the stored data, should also be avoided. Image files in shallow-nested folders is a better approach.
 
G'Day Peter:

Good summary. And no doubt you are on the correct track.

"You just have to know what to do and keep on top of the issue. A bit of knowledge is all it takes."

BTW, I am defintely not anti-digital: I'm just doing my 'due diligence' investigation before I make any move away from technology I have been familiar with (including darkroom etc.) for just on 55 years now.

It actually seems like more than 55 years since I first developed Size 116 in a tray under a dim safelight, and contact printed on POP. Sadly, I don't have those negatives, but I do have some of those early prints - which I have improved with digital technology. :)

As I wrote in another note above, my neighbour is a classic modern ex&le - somewhat like your father, I guess, in regards to storing images. He has a box of SD cards and DVDs. I think Bojan has a point about hard copy. As one magazine editor just wrote, "there are two types of hard drives ... the ones that just crashed, and the ones which are about to ..."

Anyway, this is all just Forum talk. An exercise for the interested.

Cheers,

Colin
 
Film or digital. Hmmm. Why not both? Well, assuming it has to be one or the other, your reasons for choosing either really should be based on your own individual circumstances and requirements. I'm not advising either route, but I do have some insights which I hope you might find useful one way or another.

A well-managed digital archive, along with all the good maintenance processes of ensuring suitable power, aircon, redundancy, monitoring, regular integrity checking, upgrading both hardware and software (having chosen suitable hardware and software including OS in the first place, and having the skills to configure, administer and use them), periodically converting formats along with accepted best-practice, backing up strategy and rotation of those backups (yes, a backup is considerably different from an archive) should (n.b., that's only a "should" and not a cast iron guarantee) be maintainable indefinitely - a lot longer than a film archive. Choice of cataloging software for the archive should always take into consideration how easy it is to extract the data for re-import into another format (often "can I extract all this info in XML so that I could get somebody to process it into a format for reimporting into something else?")

Sorry for labouring the point, but the key is in how the archive is managed, and an archive is very different from a backup. It's potentially a full time job all by itself, often several full time jobs for people with a variety of skillsets, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. It's not necessarily an easy option, and certainly not a panacea. And film has been around for a lot longer and is more proven for this particular task. Many film archives exist that are run by dedicated qualified librarians and archivists with specialist skills. If you're maintaining your own film archive, you'll appreciate the differences between your own practice and those of a pro archiving outfit more readily than a digital archive, which is more of a commodity.

With the digital era, everybody gets the chance to imagine that they have professional administration and archiving skills - and make their own catastrophic mistakes.

Another thing to bear in mind is that whilst film is in good condition, it can always be rescanned, giving you the option of scanning at a different resolution, or using the latest and greatest scanner or scanning techniques; almost always a better option than res&ling a given digital scan.

This sounds a bit like a diatribe against digital, but digital was my choice.

That's the film v. digital. Now, if (when) you do go for digital, bear in mind I personally wouldn't touch CD or DVD as a reliable archival format with a barge pole. It scratches, it fades, it's generally unreliable and will let you down when you need it most. Go for expensive tape drives. Go for fire safes. Go for multiple copies on multiple RAID arrays in diverse locations. OK, it sounds ultra paranoid - but the point is, digital can protect your work so much more than a single flimsy copy of a tranny or a neg if you put the effort (and the concentrated paranoia) in.

Well, just my thoughts as somebody who does a lot of digital backup (but admittedly not this far a lot of photography).

Your mileage may vary!

Andy
 
Andy:

I am exhausted just reading all that, much less doing all of that periodically. That is a full time job. Doing all that would take the fun out on my hobby.

I have slides that are over 60 years old, old 8 mm film, one from the opening days of Disneyland.

My management has included storing them in a dark cool dry place (some not so cool days). Most in Kodak slide packages and others in straight or round trays.

I also know the more you mess with something the more chance for failure. I am also not going to look for space in a salt mine either.

Have Fun:

Gilbert
 
Hi Gilbert, yeah you're right. I'm afraid I got into a bit of a writing flow there, sorry about that!

Personally, for my own photos I just have a couple of external RAID arrays, and both stored in the same location, not even 10cm apart! I guess I was just saying it's really possibly to take it to extremes depending upon just how paranoid you are about it - which is probably blatantly obvious
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Andy
 
QUOTE: I am exhausted just reading all that, much less doing all of that periodically. :UNQUOTE


Yes, an archiving / backup strategy MUST be manageable.

My approach is quite manageable:

The "backup" approach is simply to buy two sets of top quality external hard disk drives. Use one to store the images (TIF at very high resolution) and then one to store a copy. The copying is automated through a simple tool called File Synchronizer that simply copies everything from the source disk that has changed since the last copy. The target disk is an identical copy of the source: TIF files in folders. No fancy compression and no proprietary backup formats as these can cause problems later when technology moves on.

My "archive" approach is to copy a set of the images to DVDs. I get about 30 images on each DVD. I simply use Toast to copy the images, 30 at a time, to a DVD. I use top-quality blank DVDs. I have two sets. One set is at home and one set is in my office. Every 3 months I rotate the sets. So even if one place burns to the ground, the most I will lose is the last 3 months of newly scanned images. The DVDs are stored in a dark, dry, cool, location (dehumidifier cabinet at home, server room at the office). The images are stored on the DVD in their native TIF format, no compression, no proprietary backup formats. I do not use Toast's ability to do a multi-disc backup as it uses a proprietary format. The current set of DVDs are about 5 years old. They replaced a set of DVD-RAM disks that were about 8 years old when they were replaced. I know that, in the next 3 to 5 years, I will need to replace the currents DVDs with the next main-stream format.

I chose not to use tape backup because each tape drive and each tape backup utility has it's own format, creating a longevity risk.

While the above may sound regimented, it is not much work and most of the processes happen with minimal intervention. I can be doing something else while they are happening, just changing the DVD when the process demands a new one.

Sorry Andy but I do think that it is very important that you keep a copy in another location. Ansel Adams lost a lot of irreplaceable images when a fire burned out part of his studio in 1937. Now, in the digital era, we can easily protect ourselves against that by having a digital copy of our better images in two locations. Another digital advantage.

Regards
Peter
 
Andy,

I don't think what you said contained anything even near an 'extreme'.

Storing images alone is not enough, if you also want to be able to find something again without having to resort to the Alice-in-Wonderland procedure ("Begin at the beginning [etc.]")
The importance of archiving is indeed great, increasingly so with growing numbers of images in the archive.
And changing format/cataloguing software (or setting up a catalogue/retrieval system later, after the 'pile' of images/image files has grown beyond Alice-manageable proportions) can indeed be very, very much work.

And CDs and DVDs are indeed not archival quality (50 - 100 years) media, with a (reliable) life span of about 10 -15 years. Maximum, provided high quality discs are used.
Redundant storage on magnetic media, and copying periodically to 'fresh' HDs, is the best and easiest (and cheapest, by far) way to store a digital archive available.


Image file formats and software are not a problem. As long as the image fomat is known/documented, it will be very easy to write a conversion program. And most formats are indeed well documented.
But with existing software progressing, rather than starting from scratch with every new release, that will never be a problem. At worst, every file would have to be opened in a newer version of the software of choice, and then saved in the 'new' format.

Its very much the same when OS file systems are concerned.
The formats are well documented, and at worst a programmer has to write a 'hardware level' programm to read from the old file system and write to the newer file system format. Not very difficult at all.
And again, probably not necessary, since OS's too progress, maintaining backward compatibility.

So unless you skip a good many generations of OSs and image processing packages, the problem is non-existant.


Due to the lack of redundancy, storing film is more 'problematic', every item in the 'archive' being an unreplaceable original.
Keeping film in good shape over a long period of time itself is not very hard.
 
Most photographers aren't tecno nerds as much as the internet community would like everyone to be.

The protection of film negs is actually easy and very inexpensive. Fireproof safe in a cool place with some form of humidity control (replacable Silca Packs). Less cost than a bunch of Hard Drives, and no work involved except remembering the combination to the safe : -)

Dispite all that ease of film preservation, no one usually does it. So, what makes everyone think people will go through all the complex steps required to preserve digital files, and keep doing it for decades on end?

Important photographers will have all kinds of curators doing the work. The rest of us have to do it ourselves... and that mostly involves family images and some event photography. Our art projects may be interest to our great grand kids, and maybe one out of a million of us will be an undiscovered genius lauded by future generations ... but that's about it.

Frankly, most family archives are in the form of prints. My Mother is the keeper of the family photos, none of which are in neg form. But I have my Grand Father's wedding photo on my mantle. Ken Burns did a movie series using American Civil War Photos ... all from prints. I just flat bed scanned a huge lot of archival images from the 20's for a brochure being printed for a client ... all prints.

What's interesting is the whole propritary nature of RAW files which are really the "Negs", and closest to the original intent. Tiffs and Jpgs are usually worked on, and once done and saved can't be retro opened to the original. In contrast, editing in a RAW program is non distructive. You can return to the orginal at any time. Trouble is, the programs required to read these RAW files probably won't be around later. Heck, I can't open a file from the new Canon 1DMKII in last year's PSCS2 program ... I had to upgrade to PSCS3 just to access it's RAW files.

So another layer of digital preservation is needed. Conversion to DNGs ( if those even last ), and/or off-loading the propriatary RAW program to the Hard Drive along with the files ... assuming that RAW program will even be accepted by the OS 20 years from now.
 
Marc, hence my suggested (partial) solution. I have files from the 1980s that are no longer accessible (not having the budget of NASA or GCHQ).
 
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