Saving old photos

[FluffySheep]

Hi all.

Recently a funeral has brought home that my mum's generation in the family are not going to be around for ever. There are a lot of old photos that are at risk of either getting too old to see as they deterioate or the people and places in them becoming unknown and not being able to link them to a name or town, etc.

What I'm looking for is a way to store them so that they are future proofed (or as future proof as possible). I'm going to scan them (best as *.tif format?) get the older generation to add exif data for each such as names, year, location etc then the storage.

With zip discs lasting about 10 years and cd/dvd drives dropping out of fashion what ideas do the learn'd members here think will be accessible in 40 years? Also secure from viruses and clumsy deletions. My idea is a USB hdd air gapped from the Web then as cousins etc want access they get a full copy for their branch of the family tree. My sisters idea is the cloud... Mine I think will be good for maybe 10 years then need updating. Cloud worries me for long term with being secure but accessable with companies folding or randomly going under.

Any suggestions or comments?
Ta
FluffySheep

 

[throwaway4372]

The key is always having multiple copies. Whether that's a hard drive and cloud, or something else, having 1 copy is the risk with any storage. Having two copies in the same location is a weakness, hence the appeal of cloud for one of the copies.

Bit off topic, but maybe useful so I'll leave it...

IMO paper is king - because everyone's seen photos from generations ago that held up pretty well, and virtually nobody has a 20 year old hard drive, zip, tape, or usb, people have old cd/dvd but increasingly no way to read it. Ultimately, digital storage will always be at a disadvantage because you need something to be able to access it, and that means only someone doing so deliberately will ever see it. I thought a decent photo album would be sufficient to keep light and fingers off it, but there could be better options. As for metadata, just write it on the back of the photo.

There's a whole other discussion about what photos are worth. People tend to keep many photos of the same person, holiday, etc - often a whole album of similar photos. But when looking back at historical photos you don't need an album, 1-2 photos is perfectly fine, the rest of the album was really only important to the person who took the photos. So if the photos are degrading, a plan might be to scan the important ones and re-print them, then store those prints properly.

 

[ojrules]

As suggested, - Printed copies, if stored well will outlast anything.

With photos, you're probably thinking about 20+ year lifespan of storing these.

I wouldn't trust any physical media under my own personal control to guarantee no loss of data. You can get into fancy RAID hard drive arrays with bitrot prevention, but ultimately that's going to cost a lot of money, is a lot of hassle, and a fire or flood could still wipe it out. Ultimately, all physical media degrades over time. I can't remember the hierarchy, but USB sticks are poor, hard drives are also not great, and DVDs also have a finite life span.

If I were to pick a cloud provider whom I would trust to store it over the long term, I would pick Apple or AWS.

Google's history of maintaining products/services over the long term is poor, and Microsoft's cloud service is also not as mature as AWS IMO.

Any of the other start-ups/scale-ups fall into the bucket of "not enough history or momentum" for me to bet important stuff over a 20+ year span.

Therefore, I'd print the pics you like, and distribute these to friends and family, I'd also store them on AWS or Apple, and then perhaps also keep a backup in some local physical media (but don't rely too much on it).

 

[a1ex2001]

Local hard disk one online one offline and sync to major cloud vendor is how mine are stored.

 

[OspreyO]

Multiple Hard Disks for me, with some optical media as well.

Scanning is the hard part. paid services don't always give the quality you want. You also need to thin out the heard leaving only the best photos.

Then you end up with many photos anyone who knew what they are, is no longer here.