Left to its own devices, a paper document will survive for many decades, perhaps for well over a century, requiring no more than a pair of eyes and a shared language to access it. Both those things are true as far as they go, but the real question is what happens to your files in a situation of benign neglect. Internet zealots will tell you that files can always be converted to whatever new format the future demands and remind you that paper copies degrade too. I've been making this point to my friends for many years now, now just in regard to photographs but all manner of digital text documents too. Even my old Psion 5MX backup can be accessed and converted. Old file types is well known as a problem and the only time I haven't been able to open old obsolete files is when they were just so rare that nobody bothered to make a converter.
OLD ADOBE PRODUCT THAT WOULD CONVERT RASTER TO VECTOR HOW TO
It's unlikely we'd forget how to open an old file, or not be able to work it out as a tech society. evaporates, doesn't it?Īlso, the idea that something as pervasive as a jpg would fade out of use without huge availability of conversion/emulators to view or convert it is a bit laughable. So if your long term storage is digital, it can be kept current in the same place as your current/everyday storage and the problem. Leaving things indefinitely on USB drives or hard drives is not so smart, but storing *anything* in a single format for long periods is not a good idea and it can degrade - paper included. The current push is to have larger storage and regularly back it up, though, which would fix this without any issue. If paper is not taken care of, it does not.
If the files are taken care of, they will last. Re-engineering the file structure from scratch really isn't even all that difficult. Yes, my grandchildren will be able to read JPG files. Sticking things on a single hard drive and expecting them to last forever is no better or worse than putting them in a box in a leaky attic or a basement that floods periodically. paper copies of things - proper curation and care is required for both. There's nothing more or less permanent about digital files vs. Will any of these last forever? No, of course not, but as long as someone is paying a tiny bit of attention to them, they will last a very long time indeed. The digital photos are kept on the original SD card (cheaper than buying and processing a 36-exposure roll of film back in the day, isn't it?), backed up on a local hard drive, backed up on a NAS in the house, and pushed to cloud storage. Just on this basis, my kids actually have much more thorough documentation of events in their life than I ever even really had the possibility of having. There are also then 'backup copies' in the hands of close relatives in case something should happen to ours. We have a whole shelf of these now, and the kids really enjoy going through them. Basically the only old family photos that I have are in a single photo album that my mother put together when I was a toddler.Īs a comparison, we take all of our best digital photos for the year and compile them into commercially printed photo books every year and send them to the kids' grandparents as gifts.
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