Archiving and storing digital photographs
Once you have your pictures in a digital format you need to store them. Long term, this can be a little bit of a challenge due to the ever changing world of technology. It seems like every 15 or 20 years technology changes so much that you need to replace your storage system because it is out dated. The good thing about this is that it is out dated because the newest technology has improved so much. 15 years ago people were using floppy disks that held 1.4 Mb of storage. That is barely one photo! Now people are using CDs, DVDs, and USB drives that hold from 650Mb to 15Gb. The newer technology will hold hundreds to thousands of pictures where the “standard” from less than 2 decades ago would only hold one.
It is an on going task every few years to upgrade to a new digital storage method. The great thing about digital storage is that once the digital image is stored, it can be copied to another storage media without loss of data. Each new copy is a perfectly preserved copy of your original image.
Currently, the most common media for storing photo archives is CDs. A lot of manufactures claim that their CDs will last 100 years but how do they know that when they have only been making them for 10-15 years? We know that there have been bad batches of CDs that have deteriorated over a few years. The old rule of thumb to have two sources of back up is still a very good rule to follow here.
The best system of storage at this time seems to be at least two different brands of CDs in two different places. In addition, flash drives have also become more affordable and might prove to be a good second (or even third) source of back up storage.
For those of you with little faith in modern technology you can always print out a brand new stack of restored photos and store them on fresh photo paper.
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