Are our kids at risk of not knowing their youth?

It used to be that when you took a picture, it burned an image onto a film negative that was printed onto photo paper, which then you took home to enjoy with your family and friends before storing it in a photo album or shoe box. Now you take a picture with your digital camera, which then stores the image in a series of 1s and 0s that you can enjoy on your computer and share to the world. While going digital has much more benefits than film (especially cost-per-picture), it has one big drawback: it’s fragile.

Anyone who’s experienced a catastrophic hard disk failure knows that when digital media fails, it’s total. Some times, you might be able to save fragments of the data by taking it to an expensive data recovery service, but that depends on your luck. How often does this happen? Often enough that no hard disk company is willing to warranty their products for more than five years (and normally two). Sure you can protect yourself by setting up a RAID, but how many people know how to do that? (or even know what RAID is)

The other common option is to back up the data on CDs or DVDs, but most home-burnt media has a rated life span of three years. Further more, like any media, there is a chance that they become obsolete and players/readers extremely hard to find.

Photo prints, on the other hand, don’t require any extra equipment to enjoy, and while they slowly degrade over time, they never suddenly vanish (negatives are even more permanent). Also because of their nostalgic value, they’re really hard to dispose of, making sure that your child hood pictures are kept somewhere in a dark closet/attic. The first children of the digital age, on the other hand, may not know what they looked like as a child, because their parents ended up losing the bytes long time ago.

Sooner or later though, after enough of the world has suffered through priceless data losses, people will realize that there is a need for reliable long-term digital data storage. Online data storage has been around for a while, but I think it will catch on with the next jump in internet technology so that people can upload and download gigabytes of photos in minutes, not hours. In fact, I think online storage is the future of data storage, but that’s for another time.

Labels: digital, photography