I am personally quite obsessed with memory and heritage. I am saddened when I see books by the garbage container or an old building demolished. It is an issue that fascinates and worries me. I think that is why I liked so much Stephen King's masterpiece 'It' when I readed back in the early 90s: because more than about horror, it is a book about memory and forgetting.
Memory is not only a collection of images in our brain, it is also composed of objects, souvenirs not from distant places, but from past moments of our life. They help us to make our memories physical.
The most obvious form of a physical object capturing memory is photography. Photographs present past moments, moments that may never come back. This couldn't be more true than photographs including people who are not amongst us anymore.
There's a lot written about the preservation of documentary photography (for instance, the public catalan television produced an excellent documentary that explored some of the aspects related to photography preservation "Memòria fotogrà fica") but there doesn't seem to be so much information about long term personal photography preservation.
But if preservation of physical formats is already not so simple as just stuffing a book on a shelf, preservation of digital formats will be a challenge that few people understand yet. There has been some discussion about the issue from the public documents preservation point of view: "The digital dark age is a lack of historical information in the digital age as a direct result of outdated file formats, software, or hardware that becomes corrupt, scarce, or inaccessible as technologies evolve and data decay. Future generations may find it difficult or impossible to retrieve electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format" [Wikipedia]. But again, there is not so much about personal documents preservation.
And here begin my worries. All those events that can ruin an historical digital document can also happen to your personal documents (photographs being the most sentitive type, in my opinion).
The first danger, and the one everybody thinks about is physical damage: a corrupted or lost hard-drive (hard-drives can die because of power surge, because your laptop fell, or just because) o will probably mean the definitive loss of your documents (if you are not willing to pay the crazy prices charged for recovering (or at least trying to) data from damaged hardware. A virus can also delete your files, and even yourself can unwillingly delete your files.
Another possibility is not being able to read the documents because you don't have the hardware to do so. Do you have information in floppy disks? I think I transferred all information from floppy disks to CD, and I have a USB floppy reader somewhere at home, but that may not be everybody's case. Not to mention 5 1⁄4-inch disks or other obscure format (we actually had this at work).
But even if you can access your documents physically, are you sure you will be able to access them in the future?
A few years ago, I recovered from a CD some text files, but they were not written in .doc or .odt, but in .sam and .wri. For the ones who don't recognize these formats they were from Microsoft Write and Ami Pro, respectively. And no, neither .wri nor .sam are opened by Microsoft Word. You can still find programs to open these files, but can you be sure there will still be in the future?
Now if we talk about photography, maybe you are thinking ".jpg will never disappear". Well, it seems unlikely that it will in the near future (although there are movements in that direction), but it will eventually disappear someday. But, although it is true that people mostly store their photos in .jpg format, there are many other image photos (you probably have seen .gif, .png, .tiff...). We will not get into details about these formats (or about the difference between lossy and lossless formats), but I want to speak about another format you may not know, that is the format mainly used by professional (but not only) photographers: the RAW format. Let's start explaining what is the RAW format. "RAW files are uncompressed and unprocessed snapshots of all of the detail available to the camera sensor." [slrlounge.com]. RAW files contains the data the camera sensor recorded. And now you think, "well, that's just another image format"... Not exactly, because each camera manufacturer has their own RAW format. If you thought this was not messy enough, every camera model's (at least for Nikon) RAW files are different! So, even if .jpg is abandoned for another format, there will probably "always" be software to open it. But what about RAW files? Are you sure you will be able to open the files created speciffically by a camera that was sold, let's say, 20 years before? And this thought is what made me to write this post.
And so I began to think, will I be able to access these photos in 20 years? I will try to preserve these files physically (by keeping two copies of them on different hardware supports), but it will still be necessary to copy these files to contemporary physical supports of the future. But then comes another issue: you need a software that can read these files. If there is no "modern" program, an old one. But will this old software work on Windows' or iOS 2039 version (assuming these OS still exist in 2039)? If not, then we need a copy of Windows or iOS that can run this software. But will this "old" Windows or iOS work in a 2039 computer? We may need a 2019 computer to use these OS... So, at least to reduce the risk of not being able to read this file in 2039, my option is to keep of one of the two copies I keep of all photos in TIFF* format (which surely will last longer than any RAW format).
*not in .jpg, because conversion to this format means a loss of quality.
v0.02 6.04.2020
Memory is not only a collection of images in our brain, it is also composed of objects, souvenirs not from distant places, but from past moments of our life. They help us to make our memories physical.
The most obvious form of a physical object capturing memory is photography. Photographs present past moments, moments that may never come back. This couldn't be more true than photographs including people who are not amongst us anymore.
There's a lot written about the preservation of documentary photography (for instance, the public catalan television produced an excellent documentary that explored some of the aspects related to photography preservation "Memòria fotogrà fica") but there doesn't seem to be so much information about long term personal photography preservation.
But if preservation of physical formats is already not so simple as just stuffing a book on a shelf, preservation of digital formats will be a challenge that few people understand yet. There has been some discussion about the issue from the public documents preservation point of view: "The digital dark age is a lack of historical information in the digital age as a direct result of outdated file formats, software, or hardware that becomes corrupt, scarce, or inaccessible as technologies evolve and data decay. Future generations may find it difficult or impossible to retrieve electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format" [Wikipedia]. But again, there is not so much about personal documents preservation.
And here begin my worries. All those events that can ruin an historical digital document can also happen to your personal documents (photographs being the most sentitive type, in my opinion).
The first danger, and the one everybody thinks about is physical damage: a corrupted or lost hard-drive (hard-drives can die because of power surge, because your laptop fell, or just because) o will probably mean the definitive loss of your documents (if you are not willing to pay the crazy prices charged for recovering (or at least trying to) data from damaged hardware. A virus can also delete your files, and even yourself can unwillingly delete your files.
Another possibility is not being able to read the documents because you don't have the hardware to do so. Do you have information in floppy disks? I think I transferred all information from floppy disks to CD, and I have a USB floppy reader somewhere at home, but that may not be everybody's case. Not to mention 5 1⁄4-inch disks or other obscure format (we actually had this at work).
But even if you can access your documents physically, are you sure you will be able to access them in the future?
A few years ago, I recovered from a CD some text files, but they were not written in .doc or .odt, but in .sam and .wri. For the ones who don't recognize these formats they were from Microsoft Write and Ami Pro, respectively. And no, neither .wri nor .sam are opened by Microsoft Word. You can still find programs to open these files, but can you be sure there will still be in the future?
Now if we talk about photography, maybe you are thinking ".jpg will never disappear". Well, it seems unlikely that it will in the near future (although there are movements in that direction), but it will eventually disappear someday. But, although it is true that people mostly store their photos in .jpg format, there are many other image photos (you probably have seen .gif, .png, .tiff...). We will not get into details about these formats (or about the difference between lossy and lossless formats), but I want to speak about another format you may not know, that is the format mainly used by professional (but not only) photographers: the RAW format. Let's start explaining what is the RAW format. "RAW files are uncompressed and unprocessed snapshots of all of the detail available to the camera sensor." [slrlounge.com]. RAW files contains the data the camera sensor recorded. And now you think, "well, that's just another image format"... Not exactly, because each camera manufacturer has their own RAW format. If you thought this was not messy enough, every camera model's (at least for Nikon) RAW files are different! So, even if .jpg is abandoned for another format, there will probably "always" be software to open it. But what about RAW files? Are you sure you will be able to open the files created speciffically by a camera that was sold, let's say, 20 years before? And this thought is what made me to write this post.
And so I began to think, will I be able to access these photos in 20 years? I will try to preserve these files physically (by keeping two copies of them on different hardware supports), but it will still be necessary to copy these files to contemporary physical supports of the future. But then comes another issue: you need a software that can read these files. If there is no "modern" program, an old one. But will this old software work on Windows' or iOS 2039 version (assuming these OS still exist in 2039)? If not, then we need a copy of Windows or iOS that can run this software. But will this "old" Windows or iOS work in a 2039 computer? We may need a 2019 computer to use these OS... So, at least to reduce the risk of not being able to read this file in 2039, my option is to keep of one of the two copies I keep of all photos in TIFF* format (which surely will last longer than any RAW format).
*not in .jpg, because conversion to this format means a loss of quality.
v0.02 6.04.2020
