UV light and mildew: why physical objects degrade over time
tedium.co
tedium.co
This is a bit of a side-track, but most families have an archive of physical photos dating back decades, you put them in an album, and 50 years later they will still be there.
Meanwhile every family I know has decade of digital photography that was lost to broken hard-drives and corroded CD's. The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks (or outsource the process to Dropbox/Onedrive/whatever).
There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years? No-one I know still has an optical drive, and that's if they last.
I get the feeling you’ve made up your mind already.
I am all ears, please tell me which solution I could recommend to my aging parents except "pay dropbox"?
Maybe it's lack of experience, but I've never actually seen an M-Disc in the wild. I get the impression that you can't use a normal disk burner to write them, so expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them (much less maintain a RAID array) feels unrealistic. By contrast, just about everybody knows how to put photo prints in a physical album.
Just about everybody knows how to put photo files on a computer, too. The issue was how to protect against loss.
The world's Joe Schmoes won't store their physical photos in a fire-proof safe any more than they can maintain digital records.
Actually, they don't. My grandparents don't even own a computer, and my parents struggle to maintain digital collections of photographs (I can't count how many photo collections we've lost over the years due to failed hard drives, broken CDs, &c.)
I think the point about fire-proof safes is an excellent one, but we're also talking about different loss models: losing your possessions to a housefire is relatively uncommon while slowly losing your digital records to hardware failure, obsolete mediums, &c. is extremely common. Put another way: I suspect the number of people who have lose their wedding photos to hard drive failure far outsizes the number who lose the same photos to housefires.
Like you, I have never ever seen an M-disk, but back when I was 14 I burned numerous CD's with out family photos and most of them no longer work
Also people keep going on abiut a house fire, is it not going to destroy your disks too?
Some burners won't work with them, but there's a decent chance whichever one you happen to have will work.
> Expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them (much less maintain a RAID array) feels unrealistic.
This may be true, but I think we're talking about different things. I don't know that I care so much about what other people decide to do with their photos, it's their loss. I care about what I can do and what I'd recommend to friends/family/strangers who are concerned about this.
Trying to manage it yourself is work, as you’ve expressed. People who do that work for you ask for fees.
But you’ve seemingly decided that this benefit is not worth a fee so you don’t see it as a solution.
2. Get enough stars
3. Be archived by Microsoft/GitHub in Svalbard
Yes, but I babysit all my digital information via that one process, and that's a lot of information. My collection is currently sitting at just over 3 TB. That's an awful lot of photo albums, and yet it still fits on a single hard drive (per copy of all the data).
> There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years?
Yeah, probably. I can still find players for Vinyl easily enough. Mind, you'd need to burn the data to one of those fancy M-Discs; normal consumer-writable discs won't last that long.
It's easier, isn't it? Here is granddad's old HD that still works but has pitiful space compared to modern ones. Copy, paste, now you have his photos forever.
As a bonus, being able to freely take photos means that I've personally become a better photographer.
The people who took photos of my parents in their childhood and youth are most likely dead, so at this point not even they care anymore how good a photographer they were. I certainly don't, I care that I still have those photos.
Hire a cloud or two, maybe a NAS as well. I've had my NAS sit there copying down all the photos each day since forever, no intervention needed.
Someday it will die, or the cloud service will die (because Google does that to services lol), but they won't die at once.
I'd grown up watching old clips of Pele, Carlos Alberto or Tardelli, then Maradona. They looked a certain way by the time I was 20.
Then around the mid-2000s, everything went digital and soon HD as well. You can watch the 2006 World Cup and think it was happening live. The style of shorts has also more or less frozen, so it's not as easy as looking at 80s-style super short shorts to guess the year.
Same goes with photos. My parents died and I got the family album. You can tell the different colors diffuse at different rates. Shots from the 70s look a different way to ones from the 80s and 90s.
With my kids, everything is digital. I have pics of them from almost every day, and they look just the same.
I think the fading process is actually faster than we think, as even those pics of the family from the 80s looked kinda old by the mid 90s.
It's interesting to me UV light and rot are coming up in a totally different context, as it points to the importance of these two types of decay phenomena. The other, of course, is physical force, in the form of wind or physical impact. But in the absence of that the two great destroyers are microbes and radiation.
I wonder if that's partly because the same UV that would damage the vinyl is killing off the microbes.
When considering archiving old photographs, there's quite a bit of difference between colour and B&W prints, and also colour and B&W negatives. The B&W prints and negatives contain silver, which is what makes the dark spots on the print and negatives, and it's presence stops microbes attacking the material.
For colour prints and negatives, the silver that was originally present in the material is removed with a bleach stage when processing (with a dye being activated to produce the colours you see) so you need to use some other method to protect the material from microbes. I think modern colour film stock includes a stabilizer, whilst older processing used Formaldehyde.
But now that you mention it, this would be a nice opportunity for you to explain how thermodynamics applies to degradation of these kinds of materials mentioned.