"You" here being people who held digital assets themselves and didn't bring them into the future as their NAS was rebirthed across disk generations.
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.
In 2006 I successfully copied all pictures off my Motorola Razr via Bluetooth to my PC in one go. Try doing that with your new iPhone Air. Who's losing old photos again?
I think things like text messages and related memories are being lost because companies like apple jealously prevent exporting and saving. (camera roll allows export)
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.
Sad, really. My high school years were all on MySpace and I haven't seen them since. It did make me get more serious about personal data preservation as an adult though, so it's not all bad. And maybe some of those haircuts were better left to history.
A bit too much drama for nothing - storage was never reliable, HDDs were dying since forever. So anybody serious with backups did multiple physical copies, which is a strategy relevant also today.
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.
On the whole, I consider myself lucky to have lost data due to a badly configured 40GB HDD early in my digital life. I was so aggrieved that it inoculated me against data preservation complacency, and in the subsequent 25 years I haven’t lost a single byte.
As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.
I've got plenty of pictures from that era, all carefully copied from disk to disk. Analogue pictures instead are more scarce (were costly to produce) and harder to archive
Not only for early 2000's, even now people routinely keep ALL their photos on their phones, without making any copies. Take a photo -> send to someone -> keep them forever -> delete when there's no space left, that's standard lifecycle, at least in my circle.
"Probably" is doing a lot of heavylifting there. Digital backup discipline for consumers emerged way before digital cameras. We used to have backups in floppies, and then CD-R's, which were common and made physical backups very cheap. Not just data, we had to back up software too because we didn't have an app store to reinstall them from.
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.
I have all my photos back to my first digital camera in 2004. (Plus digital photos a few years further back - I used to use a service that developed and printed your film rolls and also delivered files on CD-ROM). The strategy of keep copying files to newer hardware remains undefeated.
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.
Somehow I still have them all! Fun to revisit high school and some of my first PC builds. Lots of Jinx stickers, l337 hax0r cringe, WRT54G abuse… so glad I still have it all.
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.
Keep in mind bitrot is a real thing if you roll your own storage. While most cloud storage solutions store multiple copies of your data I'm not sure if all of them have a system that checks for and fixes bitrot.
I love my ZFS server as it handles all that transparently but that's really not an option for everyone.
The digital photos are not my issue. Especially in the early 2000s the files were really small, super easy to copy. I've always moved them to a new laptop, I guess I have at least 8 copies lying around in different places.
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.
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.
I backed up my photos religiously for years. From my first digital camera in like 1995. First to CD-ROMs, then DVD-ROMs, then hard drives, and I included online backups to Google Cloud (real backups via arq, not Google Photos).
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 have a stack of old burned CD-Rs and DVD-Rs with old files, some of which are family photos. Success with pulling files off of them has been mixed. Some of the discs have visible pinholes in the reflective layer and others visually look fine but have scratched up surfaces.
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.
> "We totally lost all of our critical thinking skills "
This nugget was buried in the article, and seems appropriate. I don't get where the author is coming from. If one doesn't take some level of responsibility and modicum of effort to preserve and safeguard something valuable to them, then yeah, it might get lost.
I've very carefully hoarded photos. I don't miss the photos, but I really miss the meta-data, more-so for scanned real photos. I loved photography back in the day, and so took a lot of film photos. Even having scanned them in I've ended up with meta-data around the scan or import date, rather than actual data.
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.
Back in the late noughties, my Dad had a NAS. I had a pretty chaotic life at the time and a big stash of old pics on a hard drive I knew could die at any point.
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.
> As for the rest? Long gone, thanks to a dead laptop, defunct email and social media accounts and a sea of tiny memory cards and USB drives lost in the shuffle of multiple cross-country moves. It's like my memories were nothing more than a dream.
Welcome to ... backup.
Now, blaming this on photos, is a bit counterproductive.
26 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.
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.
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.
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.
I love my ZFS server as it handles all that transparently but that's really not an option for everyone.
Even though back in the day you would spend that on film and development as a light photo taker.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
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.
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.