Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
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Lots of relatives lost a phone or access to an account and with it, all photos from friends, text messages to deceased loved ones, and more.
all this stuff should be exportable to multiple places for lots of backups on all kinds of media.
Not the easiest operation, but hardly jealously prevented.
But text messages are jealously guarded and not exportable. Apple does this for itself, not its users.
(I was getting rid of the device and simply wanted the entire collection of photos off it.)
In the late 90's, advent of MP3 also made people focus more on digital backup strategies until Bittorrent came and people started believing that they could get things back anytime from an ethereal faucet. It wasn't so. The same happened with cloud. People thought their Google Drive was their backup. It wasn't so.
So, even the opposite could be argued: that people's digital backups got worse over the last two decades because they relied too much on third party virtual services that were not as reliable as physical media.
You have a lot more faith in typical consumers than I do. I wouldn’t call any of those I knew in the 90s/00s “disciplined” with data backups, let alone the wherewithal to have considered software backups.
My arq bot was running on my 2014 Intel Macbook Pro which would read the photos off my home server and back them up. (the server also being a local backup).
Then I got my M1 Mac and IIRC, arq didn't run there yet or required a newer version that was incompatible with the old or maybe I was just lazy. I don't remember clearly. That was 4 years ago.
Recently I thought I should really get that fixed and get my photos backed up again. My last 4 years of photos are not "backed up" to the cloud. They are backed up to my home server.
AND........ I'm starting to wonder if there is really a point. Do I really need those backups? A podcast I listen to went over how he wanted to leave his cherished books to his kids (all adults). But then he reflected that he didn't really want his dad's books and had the hard realization that his memories of his books are his and his alone and that his kids won't really want his books.
Similarly, my photos and the memories that go with them are almost all mine and mine alone and when I pass away, no one will want them. I actually scanned all of my grandmother's photo books, before she passed away. The majority of those photos have no meaning to me and she's not around to tell me what they are. Of course the ones close family are in have some meaning. Similarly, I scanned my dad's slide collection in like 2005 and none of the photos of him with friends or him with is 2nd wife have any meaning to me.
So, then my question to myself is. Do I really need to back them up more? To go through the trouble of setting up cloud storage, getting backup software working, dealing with the maintainance of that setup. If I lost them would it really be that bad?
Let me add, they are all uploaded to Google Photos, not as backup but as access, and phone based photos are also all auto-uploaded. I'd lose the origanziation I have in my personal backups, and the quality (don't have Google Photos set to full quality).
I've sometimes passed on sentimental keepsakes, only to long for them later. What seems pointless yesterday, suddenly has new meaning as I get older and gain new perspectives. In particular, my Mom passed a few years ago, and there are questions I wish I could go back and ask now that some time has passed. There are items I tossed that I wish I had at least snapped a picture of them for reference. I didn't understand the significance of certain documents in the moment.
Maybe the answer is to pick out stories that are important and include some sort of narration. Maybe the answer is to throw away the pictures without meaning and savor the ones with meaning, and make sure that meaning is recorded for your kids.
I agree with you that a certain portion of images are no longer meaningful, but it's tough to say a-priori what those are. So keep them all. The real problem is that photos often have notes on the back, but digital images rarely have any metadata.
I foresaw this problem back in 2002 and have been using a time-oriented naming convention and keeping little XML files with notes. I posted a little rant about it back in the day and made some simple tooling, which has been good enough to keep some basic notes with my photos.
That's the point. I am lucky that I have kids and maybe they will like to take a look at some pics once in a while but certainly they won't go through ten thousands of images.
When it works, yes.
Take photos -> connect to PC -> photos are not there -> go on Iphone photos app, look for them, look _at_ them -> connect again to PC -> they are finally there. Of course always giving the password. FY Apple.
Much easier (and faster) than the BT stuff from the Razr era.
Even without Apple software, connecting to a Windows PC with a USB cable, iPhone will present itself as a digital camera so you can import photos with the built-in Microsoft photos app or file explorer. You can also use Apple’s Windows software.
On Mac, even without iCloud, you can sync photos “the old way” just like iPod synced content used to do. The photos app will transfer photos over USB or WiFi and you can even have it automatically delete imported photos on your iPhone to free up space, mimicking the workflow of a digital camera.
The Photos app can export to plain files trivially, with a simple drag and drop.
There are also iPhone applications that automatically handle background imports (such as Ente and Google Photos). There are also numerous iPhone transfer apps that can integrate into the share sheet, the possibilities are basically endless.
There’s also AirDrop, or you can move files via the files app to any compatible cloud or local photos app.
Obviously none of this is massively impressive to anyone who has used Android including myself, but a lot of the assumptions surrounding iOS and iPadOS being inflexible are somewhat outdated.
I love my ZFS server as it handles all that transparently but that's really not an option for everyone.
With that, nothing is lost unless facing a proper clusterfuck. Just checked my photos from 2004 trip to US where I bought my first digital camera, yepp all good across few older and one new HDD.
More problematic are the first analog videos from the 80s, the magnetic tape now starts to rot, and it's not that easy to copy those.
I also have film from the 60s and 70s, this is slowly becoming an issue too. But honestly I don't care that much about those past memories from my parents and grandparents.
And, anything from a digital camera will be missing things like GPS location, which phones include and I think is great. I've used location search so many times to find photos. I can't always remember when we went somewhere, but pretty often someone will ask about a photo from a trip to X place, and then location search finds it easily.
Photos themselves have bounced between iPhoto, Aperture, Photos, etc but largely remained intact.
The library is backed up to the usual 3 places: a local server (nightly rsync to a ZFS array), stored in iCloud, and in Backblaze, so hopefully safe. And of course, all are on my laptop too.
Tooling and documentation for recovering damaged discs is sparse, which doesn't help matters. I've been meaning to try going to a local retro game shop to get some of the discs resurfaced but I'm skeptical that it'll make much difference.
As far as I'm aware those discs contain (or did contain) the only copies of a bunch of those files. There might be some old hard drives or CF cards kicking around the family house but I doubt it and even if there are, they've either since been wiped or have succumb to bitrot.
I am aware of in-filestore corruption of my files including images, and I know I have holes but the curation failure is more in 1984-1990 than after digital cameras entered my life and a scanner is rectifying some of that. But it's a road of tears regarding metadata.
More worrying is the failure inside cloud. Takeout from Google suggests some bitrot lurks in the assets there too.
That 1200bpi reel of tape, and the pre DLT tape cartridge are a worry: media may be OK, readers are rare and services doing recovery charge significantly more than "photo memories of granny" costs.
Even though back in the day you would spend that on film and development as a light photo taker.
Still, there are big gaps due to prevailing photo-taking habits. Unless you were seriously into photography, people took way fewer photos. Lots of posed pics of family and friends on special occasions, fewer of everyday life. I have like 2 pictures of my undergraduate projects.
M-Disc is the only real solution to preserving data a whole lifetime. It is the both the longest-lasting storage medium, and the most compatible.
From the Wikipedia page I can't see that the industry is abandonign the format. For sure it's not the mass market but Verbatim are still producing the discs, it seems.
This is extremely interesting, I had no idea. Too bad it doesn't see more widespread usage.
As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.
The time was 10 p.m., I was done. I hit save. While the application was writing the file to disk, I decided to move the bulky monitor from one side of my desk to the other. Somehow while doing so I hit the power button (or took the power cord with me, I'm not sure). PC went off while writing operations were still on.
The file could not be recovered, and of course there was no other copy.
I spent the rest of the night recreating the essay from memory, and thinking I had been extremely unlucky.
I've never lost any file again, ever.
I got my first digital camera in 2001 and still have all the photos from then as well as all the images I downloaded from the internet starting from 1991 through Usenet groups.
I scanned all of my dad's old photos going back to 1965 and have our family photos going back to the 1930's.
Everything is backed up twice and verify every file checksum twice a year.
I know not everyone is a computer expert but 1) we are on Hacker News 2) prebuilt NAS systems have a lot of these features now and can backup to another unit.
This. Those arguing it's hard for their grandma: I can understand. Those arguing it's hard for themselves: there are probably better websites to frequent for them and I dispute their "hacker" status.
> Everything is backed up twice and verify every file checksum twice a year.
How do you do the checksum? Mine is added to the filename:
DSC_00219347-b3-7e282693a4.jpg
HDDs (offline and both on-site and off-site), SSDs, dedicated servers, server at home running ZFS, ...
I plan to buy used LTO tape gear too.
P.S: I still have source code from DOS stuff I wrote in 1991 so there's that.
They're in iCloud, backed up to my NAS at home, backed up to another cloud vendor, backed up to two different external hard drives, stored in separate locations, as well as archived on Blu-Ray M-Disc media, also identical copies, stored next to the external hard drives.
They're not exactly "great quality" most of them, us being early adopters of digital cameras (2000'ish), so 1.5 megabit, up to 3.5 megabit for our last "real" digital camera. There are some Canon EOS 500D SLR photos in there as well, but we continued to shoot our old an trusty analogue SLR cameras for years after that.
These days it's all phone pictures anyway. I don't think I have more than a handful of SLR quality photos of the kids.
Any brand/size of discs you recommend?
Blank media is becoming harder and harder to come by, and prices have increased to 2-4x of what they were.
For now at least, I have enough media to fill out the next couple of years, 1 year per 100GB disc, and we'll see where we are by then. My prediction is that it won't be any easier to archive to optical media by then. If you need proof, just check your local DVD/Blu-Ray vendor for latest copies of movies/shows.
I know Sony and others are working on 1TB size discs, but they're all "enterprise archiving", so probably not within price range of consumers.
Dad offers to keep them for me. He's a sensible, stable chap. "Sure I say", and do a full backup of my old pictures and crap to his NAS.
Five years later, the HD is long dead, I'm more together and putting together a fresh setup. I recall the backup and figure I'll merge it with my current files.
He has no memory of the backup, nor ability to find it.
FML. Worst. Backup strategy. Evar.
Welcome to ... backup. Now, blaming this on photos, is a bit counterproductive.