On 2013-06-14 07:57, Jan Faul wrote: > > On Jun 14, 2013, at 7:22 AM, YGelmanPhoto wrote: > >> With all this talk about storage disasters and with unreadable data due to advanced hardware (and software?), I'm beginning to think that I have to print every image I want to save. Of course, that includes printing negatives as well so I'll still be able to print positives the old fashioned way. >> >> So, does anyone have good info on longevity of transparencies? Most of my images are black/white, so I'm mostly interested in black/white negatives. > > Not that I would use my information as a guideline, but I have glass negatives made by my great-grandfather in the 1880’s to 1915. You can see prints from them on fineartamerica.com under my name in the Pre-WW1 section > > I also have Kodachromes made by my father from 1945-1963 and they are fine. He shot with a Leica, Retina IIa, and Nikon S and I just wish he had learned to use a tripod a bit earlier. He had a really nice aluminum Star-D which mostly hung on the wall of his office. I've got my mother's Kodachromes, and have scanned a number of them (just family snapshots, of no photographic interest, but of interest to me) so I can say they're in good condition, as are my own early Kodachromes (1966 is my earliest color snapshots). I see definite fading in some of my early Ektachromes though (early 1970s). > > Personally I think you are overreacting. I have a dozen or so HD’s which start up whenever I want, to say nothing of hundreds of CD’s and DVD’s. I accessed a CD from 1995 yesterday. Every time I fill up a drive I put it on the shelf in my vault in a Tupperware box as backup. So far there are eight. If you think there is a good brand to avoid, I think that is fiction. They all break down. My most consistent drives are from LaCie, but also WD is good and so is Hitachi. I have just had two G-Raid drives fails with about 6TB of files and that’s not every funny. The problem is in relying on a *single* copy of anything digital. When you're working with stuff you're trying to provide really archival security for, a single copy is never enough. Copies in only one physical location are not enough. Luckily hard drives are cheap. Also, they have to be checked every year or two, and replaced when they get near old enough to worry about (or earlier if they show signs of problems). I agree strongly that there isn't any clear long-term trend on what company makes the most reliable (or least reliable) drives. Sometimes a company will have a bad patch, either just a bad production run of one model, or occasionally longer, but very often that same company makes fine products before and after. And they *all* have bad patches. My one bit of paranoia there is that, if I'm buying a set of drives to use together (bunch of mirrored pairs or a RAID setup), I try NOT to get the same model for all the drives, and NOT to buy them all from the same batch. Because the most *likely* faults in drives are going to be similar on drives that went down the same assembly line close to each other. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
