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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

"But digital photos, while not nearly as high a resolution as a modern pro-quality camera can take, do not age themselves quite so quickly."

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.

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Also, how likely are digital copies to cross generation boundaries? When grandfather dies, a family member is likely to clean out his home, find the photo album and ask "what do we do about this?". But will that happen with his digital photos?

> But will that happen with his digital photos?

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.

Assuming that someone has the time and interest to go through granddad's old HD, looking for stuff. Which may be in a non-obvious place, in a HD otherwise stuffed full of horse videos copied off YouTube, or other stuff that only he had any use for. The old-school physical photo album was far less likely to be overlooked and discarded.

They might be in the cloud and never catch anyone's attention at all. I think it is much about catching interest and attention. If you don't know what is on the harddrive, chances are you will not bother.

I know multiple people whose homes burned down. Physical copies are quite vulnerable to loss.

> The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks

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.

You just skipped over all the solutions to the digital problems and ignored the vulnerabilities inherent in single physical copies such as damage or loss.

I get the feeling you’ve made up your mind already.

"You just skipped over all the solutions to the digital problems"

I am all ears, please tell me which solution I could recommend to my aging parents except "pay dropbox"?

Right, give you an answer except the answer.

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.

You seem like you already have your mind made up, and you already know what people are going to suggest ahead of time! I wish I could predict the future like that . . . As others have pointed out, m-disks will preserve your data hundreds of years, but I personally use a RAID array. Of course in 50 years there will still be dvd readers, don't be overly alarmist.

> As others have pointed out, m-disks will preserve your data hundreds of years, but I personally use a RAID array.

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.

> 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

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.

"I've never actually seen an M-Disc in the wild"

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?

> 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.

> Just about everybody knows how to put photo files on a computer, too. The issue was how to protect against loss.

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.

Please don't tell me you use raid as backup?

I used to have a bunch of film that needed developing. So did others in my family. Unfortunately, I couldn't always afford processing. Digital doesn't have that. I have a phone, which means I have a camera. Even if I lose photos, I've been able to enjoy them for a period of time.

As a bonus, being able to freely take photos means that I've personally become a better photographer.

That's not even moving the goalposts, that's like walking off the playing field to do something else entirely.

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.

My mum and sisters have obsessed over a photo album application with captions, family tree and password protected diary in early 2000s. The photos have survived as files. But they have given up on the apps and the data. Now mum is investing into My Heritage which she thinks will survive forever.

For most non-HN types I think the answer is FB and Instagram. but the posting has trended away from the actual 'family memories' photos many of us would want to save. Wouldn't want to bet on that being there 15 years from now though.

Facebook images have such low quality, and posts tend to randomly disappear. I wouldn't use it as any kind of archiving tool.

Yeah for people that actually know about that or care. But for like my mom, that's where she posts and stores stuff. All the grandkid photos that's the only place they exist off her phone which probably does not have great backups

1. Make a GitHub repository where everyone can send their most important photos, encrypted with their own keys.

2. Get enough stars

3. Be archived by Microsoft/GitHub in Svalbard

So if the photos are encrypted, how do you check they're photos at all? Your solution doesn't exist because any such service offered will be immediately flooded by undesired use. It'll spread illegal content ranging from video game ROMs to child pornography. Script kiddies will use it as a command & control server.

> There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things

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.

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