PERSONAL MEDIA By Will Fastie Nothing lasts forever. Or does it? The readership of this newsletter is old enough to have used, if not embraced, a host
[See the full post at: Saving history]
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Saving history
- This topic has 57 replies, 22 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 11 months ago.
AuthorViewing 36 reply threadsAuthor-
Re: “Why save the history? Who cares?”
I believe that you are right in saying that the younger generation will care about your memories- later if not now. From my experience, it just takes a little perspective- which usually comes with time.
One service that I use and really like for stuff like this is https://FamilySearch.org. It is a free service that allows you to compile your family history together to be preserved indefinitely. In recent years, they have added robust features for adding photos, documents, audio, and metadata to the individuals in your family tree. It’s not exactly data backup, but it is an effective solution at preserving those memories for (not-yet interested) generations to come.
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I haven’t looked at Family Search in a while but they are owned by the Mormon Church which has a long history in accumulating genealogical data. They also have local services in many places where you can get help in researching your family tree for free.
I presently use Ancestry and MyHeritage and have picked up a program named RootsMagic that can interact with Ancestry and MyHeritage to bring data down to an offline archive.
I believe the primary reason that young people don’t see the value in historical info is that it is often presented to them in the form of shoeboxes of photos or stacks of printed paper with no logical organization. The advantage of programs like Family Search, Ancestry and MyHeritage is that you can construct visually appealing family trees that you can zoom into, scroll around and clearly see relationships. You can pin info about each person to the person, including photos, documents like birth certificates, draft cards, marriage licenses, gravestones, etc. bringing a level of organization to the story of your family that most people rarely achieve offline.
Ten years ago I knew very little about my family history. I also did not know who my real father was. I now have a family tree that goes back into the 1800’s on my mother’s side and consists of about 2600 people. A few months back, I finally learned who my real dad was through a half-niece that decided to get her DNA done by Ancestry. This will add at least another 400 people to the tree that I had been working on linking together. Fun times!
I always point people to the Finding Your Roots TV program to see how valuable old info can be. The program is easy to relate to because it revolves around digging into the background of 2 or 3 actors/celebrities that many people are familiar with. It’s generally on Tuesday evenings on your local PBS channel.
Finding your roots with
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
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Hey Y’all,
FYI: There are special Archival DVDs you can get that will last much longer than the standard ones. Get a Good USB DVD Writer and you should be good to go for quite a while.
I use a LG Slim Portable DVD Writer for keeping my wife’s genealogy records safe.
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Long term digital data storage has been created and hopefully will be generally available in the future. The link below explains 5D glass disc that can:
It’s been estimated that the storage medium could withstand temperatures up to 1,000 degrees C and last 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading.
‘5D’ storage could fit 500TB on a CD-sized glass disc
I also recently read an article (which I can’t find right now) on a change in how data is stored on a flash drive and testing indicates data deterioration is decreased to 10% of what it used to be which theoretically increase data storage 10 times (aka ~ 100 years).
Technology may solve long term storage considerations.
Side Note: I too saw that the younger generation was not very interested in old family photos. Once I digitalize the photos I used Windows built in software to create a “video” with background music. I also add text to each photo identifying individuals in the photos. Now that younger generation enjoys viewing those old family photos while preserving the family history.
HTH, Dana:))
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Speaking as a genealogist (family historian), I urge people to keep as much detail as is practical about the images. Dates, places, and especially names are important. I have many, many old photos of relatives I can identify but I have no idea who the others in the photos are. Fortunately, the photos are mostly old enough that, like slides, the date is printed either in the border or on the back by the developer.
Your siblings and your offspring don’t care? I can come close to guaranteeing that your offspring’s offspring will! My experience is that interest in family history skips generations, for whatever reason. That’s not universal, of course, but it seems to happen more often than not.
The one thing I don’t recall seeing in the article is to be sure that the technology continues to exist to read the format you use! It wouldn’t surprise me if the day comes when there is no software left to read a .jpg file, for example. If that becomes a threat, be sure to convert everything again!
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My brother spent a LOT f time digitizing family photos, slides and black and white negatives. Dad was a photography buff did some of his developing of film, and 4×5 and 6×9 negatives. Dad did not have the equipment to print his photos. I’m not sure how or where that was done.
The brother digitized over a 1000 images, and meticulously named the subjects, where possible. My/our generation was fairly easy, since we were still alive. Our parents and grandparents were another story. By the time he started on this project, all the family members of that generation were deceased.
He collected all the pictures after our mother died in 2007. She was the last of that generation (aunts, uncles on both sides). We had a limited contact with my fathers side of the family. Cousins on mom’s side were still around and we had kept in touch with them and were available to ask questions. Dad’s brothers, he was one of six, all scattered from southern Indiana to Chicago, Grand Rapids, Rochester, and one ended up working with the Indians in southern California. Hard to keep track of that group. Again, mom was the last of that group to die.
I have thanked by brother for spending the time and energy to take on the task of preserving our family history.
QUESTION: Is it a good idea to save all this information to the cloud? For the most part these images are jpg’s. I’m not too concerned with file formats, especially jpg’s but the stability of the various cloud storage providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and others). There is an associated cost to this method of preservation, but I don’t think it is too expensive. Our collection of family photos is about 2.3GB. Not a lot of required space, but the files still needs to be saved. Apple charges me about $1/month for 50GB of storage.
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There are special Archival DVDs
You’re quite right. But I don’t think the discs are the issue – I think it’s the players. Hardware.
Is it a good idea to save all this information to the cloud?
My opinion is no, for two reasons.
It may be the case that the cost of cloud storage is within your budget. However, let’s say you kick the bucket (God forbid). Hopefully, you will have left detailed instructions behind, but if you have automatic payments to various services, your survivors are going to take a hard look at that drain on finances while they attempt to set your affairs in order. Unless you have been detailed and clear, the plug can be pulled on those services with litttle thought.
I don’t consider the cloud “tangible.” You can’t put your hands on it. Physical assets are tangible. When your survivors start dealing with them, they’re less likely to be hasty. And if you left instructions, at least there won’t be pressure to turn off those direct payments – your people can take their time trying to figure out what they’ve got and what to do with it.
I probably go a bit overboard with digital preservation, but I do want to expand on what the article said about hardware and apply that to the external drives that we store our digital media on, whether that be converted media or media that has always been digital.
Mr. Fastie said “In other words, expect the media to outlast the hardware.”, and that is very much true. If you have precious media, don’t just store it on one drive, make sure you have at least two copies of it. Drives can and do fail and even if they don’t outright fail, data degradation (bit rot) is a real thing, as is ransomware.
I personally store copies of everything precious to me on three drives, as well as in the cloud. I know that that is probably going overboard, but external drives are so cheap and the data so important to me that I don’t see why not.
I also periodically use a piece of software called Hashdeep to check for any data degradation. Unfortunately, the software is no longer being updated, but it does still work on Windows 10 (I’ve not tried it on Windows 11). Hashdeep is a piece of software that can create and audit checksums of every file in a directory you specify. It’s simple, but it does the job of telling you when a file has been corrupted so you can replace the corrupted file with an uncorrupted copy.
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About 15 yrs ago I used a commercial service to digitize some of my parents’ old family slides and photos. The quality was not as satisfying as I would have liked. For instance, photos that were meant to be low-light came back auto-exposed to be brighter. It was disappointing to see artful sunset scenes brightened up to look like it was midday, washing out all the sunset colors.
So when my father’s health was failing in 2008, I began digitizing all my parents’ slides and photos myself, using an Epson Precision flatbed scanner with transparency attachment. As Will said, it’s excruciatingly time-consuming. But I justified the time because if I didn’t do it, the photos — including a number of inherited photos from as far back as 1903 — could be lost to history.
After I retired in 2015, I decided it was time to tackle my own personal media collections — slides, photos, videotapes, audio LP and tape collections.
I began with the slides and photos, many of which I could scan at higher quality directly from the negatives instead of prints. Again, the Epson Perfection scanner worked beautifully, but the project (some 3000 photos) took the better part of a year, working off and on.
While working on those, I read an article (2016) that the last company in the world making VHS players was ceasing production. That scared me because I had a lot of family videos from the early 1980’s that were recorded onto full-size VHS tapes. (That was before the Sony HandiCam was invented.) So I immediately set to digitizing my VHS home videos, using an analog-to-digital converter that plugged into a firewire add-in card in my computer.
Next, I tackled all my Video-8, Hi-8, and Digital-8 camcorder tapes. I had a Digital-8 camcorder, which was backward-compatible with the earlier formats, and playback could be output via firewire. That meant I could use the camcorder to digitize the analog Video-8 and Hi-8 tapes, as well, without having to invest in another A-to-D converter.
The process to convert my mini-DV tapes was basically the same — playing the tapes in the camcorder directly into my computer via firewire.
All together, I converted about 300 videotapes.
Incidentally, both my VHS player and my mini-DV camcorder have died in the last few years, so if you have conversions to do, I urge you to get them done ASAP before your equipment no longer works!
My current project, which is now about 75% complete, is digitizing my LP collection (about 300 records). I considered buying a new turntable with USB output, but it was hard to justify the price for what would be a one-time project when I already had a good, audiophile quality turntable and sound system that still worked.
Instead, I opted for a Behringer UFO202 converter, and it’s exceeded all my expectations. I highly recommend it! It’s specs are good (freq response 10-20k, THD 0.05%, S/N -89 dbA), and it sits between your turntable and your preamp. Unplug your turntable from the phono inputs of your preamp and plug it into this, and plug this into the line/tape/aux inputs on your preamp. (The Behringer has its own phono amplifier, so you must bypass the phono stage in your preamp.) The USB plug on the Behringer plugs into your laptop or desktop computer, and it couldn’t be simpler.
Once that’s done, my final project will be converting about 40 reel-to-reel audio tapes, which I’ll also be able to do with the Behringer.
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I have found nothing better for archival scanning than Vuescan from Hamrick Software. Incredibly cheap at $100 bucks, it replaces proprietary scanner drivers and allows you to make extremely high-resolution scans far beyond the manufacturer’s original specifications.
Vuescan has allowed me to continue to use old scanners no longer supported by the manufacturers but still completely functional. Vuescan would be worthy of a full review by Windows Secrets, but I’m not sure I want it to be discovered and drive the price up!
Next are some resources. I found a website titled “How to Digitally Archive and Share Historical Photographs, Documents, and Audio Recordings.” Google that. I won’t include a link because I’m probably not allowed to. Some great ideas as well as appropriate archival standards.
I found another website called “Scan Your Entire Life.” It is not as up-to-date as I could wish but has lots of good ideas and recommendations about archiving digital content.
Kodachrome color slides processed between roughly 1950-1970 were coated on the emulsion side with lacquer to provide protection against dirt, scratches, and fingerprints. Mold tends to grow on the lacquer from decomposition of the ingredients and also penetrates from the lacquer to the emulsion, where it thrives.
I’m highly allergic to mold. Removing the slides from the cardboard mounts and then cleaning them before scanning can be a challenge. I wound up doing that part of the project wearing a hazmat suit, gloves, and respirator while working outdoors. With hindsight, I probably should have outsourced scanning the moldy slides!
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Some observations from scanning Kodachromes, Ektachromes, and other slides and black and white negatives from the 1950s and 1960s:
My first pass at it, in the early 1990s, was to take selected slides from a certain collection to a commercial prepress house that used a room-size Scitex drum scanner. The slides were taken out of their cardboard frames and taped under cellophane to the drum. The scans were detailed and color and contrast were good.
I scanned many of the same slides on an Epson Perfection V750 flatbed scanner about ten years ago. The results were not sharp enough. While the scanner performs well with documents laid directly on the glass, it must guess at how far away the surface of the slide is in the holder, and that distance varies across the image due to warp. When I look at photos in magazines that publish images in this genre (railroad history), I can easily spot slides that have been scanned on a flatbed scanner.
Slides or negatives laid on the glass, and B&W negs in holders, will often exhibit “Newton rings.”
I scanned using both Epson and VueScan software. Color casts varied significantly, with VueScan tending toward blue-green.
Many of the slides were scanned a few years ago by a friend using a consumer grade scanner. The results were mediocre–not sharp and color off.
After some research I bought a used Nikon LS9000 slide scanner. I also have a friend who owns a somewhat smaller model, the LS5000. Neither has been manufactured for years; they use a Firewire connection to the computer and the software is designed for Windows 7, but these are reputed to be the best slide scanners around. The results on my LS9000 were sharp with good color and contrast. My friend’s LS5000 actually was a hair sharper.
Some reviewers suggested that Nikon discontinued these scanners because the customers essentially tended to use them once and then sell them. There was thought to be no long term market.
Concerning B&W negatives: I have found that simply scanning the negative tends to result in an image with poorer midtone contrast than a print. Count me skeptical if good quality is the goal. Of course it is getting difficult to find anyone to print B&W negs using the traditional process, rather than using the process designed for color negs.
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Yes, many current pc’s do not have an optical drive, but are they really going away?
I don’t think they’re going away entirely, but they used to be standard equipment on just about every PC – desktop or laptop. That’s no longer the case. The market has already cratered.
I used to have a huge collection of 5-1/4″ and 3-1/2″ floppies, as well as Iomega ZIP disks, something like 700 in all. Nearly 20 years ago, I captured the data from as many as I could (some of the floppies were unreadable, about 1%) and put them all on one CD! I refresh that disc every five years by writing another one. However, in the next cycle I will put all the data on two or three USB thumb drives because they are faster, work with just about any PC, and get bigger and cheaper every day.
My floppy archive is less than 1GB, but it’s hard to find USB thumb drives smaller than 16GB. Which simply means I can get a little redundancy by writing several copies on each thumb drive.
In truth, the major reason I still want a CD/DVD drive is to put my CD-based music collection into digital form. I used to send archive discs to my clients, but now I send thumb drives if they want a physical copy.
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Thanks to Will Fastie for creating this topic, which has clearly generated a lot if interest.
So far, no one seems to have mentioned a very simple alternative to the purported deterioration of SSDs with age: the old, dearly beloved HDD — a spinning platter hard drive, especially a laptop drive. You’ve probably got some lying around from when you cloned up to an SSD for the better speed.
Such drives made by Hitachi back in the late aughts and early teens, prior to its being absorbed by Seagate (or Western Digital, I forget which), were superbly made and highly reliable. They are widely available on eBay at very modest prices, and in many cases advertised as “new.” Their data lifetime certainly exceeds the 5 years mentioned for SSDs.
Most often, in my experience the only thing that ever went wrong with a carefully handled laptop drive was that the platter bearing would dry up without use so it wouldn’t spin. Fire them up occasionally to prevent that, and clone them at the slightest hint of any unexpected noise. I never had a head crash, nor have I ever experienced “bit loss due to cosmic rays,” or any of those other old canards.
A couple of HDD clone backups of everything until the much vaunted “glass” solution above becomes widely available is inexpensive insurance.
PS: the archiving question is far more important and urgent in the movie industry. I read recently that the state of the art solution there has become, of all things, magnetic tape!
— AWRon
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So far, no one seems to have mentioned a very simple alternative to the purported deterioration of SSDs with age: the old, dearly beloved HDD
It’s certainly an option, and new drives are certainly affordable.
However, you mention the precise reason I don’t recommend that alternative – HDDs are made to spin, so putting them in a box and letting them sit for five years is just asking for trouble.
With one exception during my lifetime, all the HDD failures I’ve encountered came after the fifth year. Thus my standard recommendation to friends, family, and clients has been to swap them out for new drives after five years. I was doing the same thing 25 years ago, so it’s not new advice.
Digitizing copyrighted material, such as music and videos, is a violation of the law.
Not if you’ve paid for it. Loading one of your purchased CDs into iTunes is not illegal. Nor is recording something off the air (i.e., Sony decision re VCRs) and keeping a copy of it. What you can’t do is sell it.
Archivists preserve …
Indeed they do. And the serious ones at large institutions have the resources to create and maintain the environments that are ideal for preserving particular physical assets. Most people can’t manage that.
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Will, Great article, but conspicuously missing was any mention of VHS. I have well 0ver 30 VHS tapes, both conventional and Super, that I would like to digitally archive. I’ve tried a few “dongle” type devices with varying degrees of disappointment. Any thoughts? I have a few VHS machines, including Super. Thanks, Bill
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Just about all computers in the past few decades have come with a sound card that has an audio input jack so you can record analog audio and turn it into digital wav, mp3, etc. files. This has not been the case with video however, and one must obtain another special video card that allows inputting analog video (from VHS tapes) and turning it into digital mp4, etc. files. You must also usually obtain the software necessary to do this as most OS’s don’t come with the ability to record video.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, but video seems to have always been more difficult to copy on to CD, DVD, hard drives, etc. I still have two combination DVD/VHS players that work fine, but I’m going to have to get some of my personal VHS tapes digitized too just to be sure they’re preserved.
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I got a cheap dongle and Arcsoft Showbiz DVD to convert our VHS and Video-8 to DVD and it worked fine – I didn’t bother chaptering up the separate bits on the videos so that made it just a matter of recording to a big video file then writing to DVD. The first one I got converted by a service chopped the tape into sections with navigation but as ours were mostly just holiday videos there really wasn’t a need.
In 1994, I co-ventured with the Erie Lackawanna (Railroad) Historical Society to pay the Pennsylvania State Archives to microfilm much of the corporate records of the Erie Railroad and predecessors in their collection. I received one set of duplicate microfilms and worked with them using an ancient second-hand Kodak Recordak “teepee” reader located near my computer. I had to read, then turn and transcribe on the computer. Quite the test of short-term memory, and tiring work.
About ten years ago I noticed that some rolls were starting to fade, so I had them digitized. Now I could put the PDF on the screen next to my Word document.
The microfilm rolls were numbered in an opaque fashion, which made it difficult to understand the sequence of things like board of directors minutes. I was ready to digitize the microfilms because I realized that the material would remain all but inaccessible otherwise. In order to keep the task simple for the scanning service, each page was saved as a separate PDF. I saved all of them as a separate file and socked away the original scans on the external hard drive they came on. I then combined the PDFs in Adobe Acrobat and created working copies sorted by type of material and date. The working copies can be highlighted and annotated. (I live in fear that future changes in the PDF reader or related technology might render some or all of these PDFs unreadable, but that’s just something to keep an eye on.)
Similarly, I have thousands of digital newspaper clippings, with the originals saved in folders reflecting the newspaper’s location. File names start with the year-month-day, so they sort themselves chronologically. Working copies are organized in subject folders.
And this is the point: Digitizing makes the material useful, where otherwise it would just be overwhelming. My subject folders for clippings are often specific enough that they contain maybe 25 to 50 clippings, a number small enough to absorb and keep in mind when I start writing.
The same holds true for family photos and similar material. The ability to organize it digitally is a big advantage.
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Just about all computers in the past few decades have come with a sound card that has an audio input jack
Just about all desktop computers have come with audio jacks, and most of those were based on the sound capabilities built into the motherboard. But laptops are a different story. They make up the majority of PC sales, along with tablets. And I can’t remember the last time I saw an Apple computer with RCA jacks.
Your point is well taken, though. There are a lot of PCs out there with built-in sound.
… conspicuously missing was any mention of VHS.
I did mention the format in the second paragraph, along with VHS-C and BetaMax, but you’re right that I didn’t mention VCRs in in hardware section or practical advice sections. Which is odd, because I have a VCR about four feet away from where I’m sitting. I keep it handy because I’m converting tapes for friends and, soon, for myself.
I have been wanting to digitize all our family photo negatives from back in the day before digital cameras. I have kept putting it off, but a couple of years into retirement I decided to tackle the project. Most of our negatives were 135 and 110; however, the kicker was that our wedding photos were all medium format (120), and some of my oldest stuff was also medium format.
A few years back I bought a Wolverine scanner for around $100. And it sat in a box until now.
I started scanning using the Wolverine. Pro: it goes quickly. Cons: color and quality are ok and it does not do medium format. However, the scan is better than the original prints we have. So is it good enough to scan most of our negatives. But I thought: but I should be able to get more detail and better color.
So last week I started researching negative scanning. People have devised all sorts of work arounds, including light boards. Scanners are available, but expensive. But I found a number of sites and folks that recommended the Epson Perfection scanners. And most found the least expensive, the Perfection V600 to work extremely well. Unfortunately, the V600 is not made anymore. But I was able to find a NEW V600 on Ebay for an excellent price ($400 including shipping).
Long story short:
The V600 has trays that handle the 135 and the 56mm medium format as well as some panoramic negatives. It also handles slides. I have read that you can make 110 scans, but there is no tray for them.
The software is decent and requires maybe an hour or two of experimentation. Basically, I just need a good scan and then I can import it into my photo processing program.
Mechanics: Loading the scanner is relatively slow. And the scan can take anywhere from a minute or so for a 2400 dpi 12MB file to five if you go to 4800 dpi (which sort of maxes out the quality for the film from the old point and shoots). You can go up to over 12000 dpi, but I don’t want to think how long that would take. That being said, upon importing it and processing, I get excellent quality files that are a massive improvement over my old photo prints. This scanner easily handles my old point and shoot negatives, and given the high dpi on the scanner I have no doubt it will handle high quality negatives.
Comments: Since it is so fast, I continue to use the Wolverine for decent large size “thumbnails” to save 90% of the collection. I will then go through them to select photos that I will scan on the Epson. (I can do around 100 negatives an hour on the Wolverine, and about 10 an hour on the Epson.)
I will admit I haven’t tried scanning the wedding medium format from wedding photographer’s Hasselblad yet, but I will update this if there are any issues.
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Unfortunately, the V600 is not made anymore.
I was not aware of that. Epson’s site indicates that the V600 is out of stock and I know that sometimes this an in indicator of the product’s imminent demise, but the V600 has been in and out of stock for the last year. So I’m not sure it’s gone just yet.
Do you have a source for your information? Because if that scanner is gone, there are very few other alternatives. The Perfection V850 Pro now lists for $1,299, quite the high price.
Based upon the number of negatives my wife and I are likely to scan, our V600 will end up costing us about $0.20 per negative. For the V850, that would soar to $0.87.
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The V700 (of which I own two) and V750 (same thing except with a wet plate capability, IIRC), is a good alternative. My recollection is that the V800/850’s only significant change was to substitute an LED lamp. I found my second V700 on Ebay, intending to drag it around to those research libraries that will let me scan onsite. It looks beat up but I have been using it at home on a big scanning project recently and it performs well.
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You are correct, the Epson site shows it as out of stock. BestBuy shows it as not available. I may have made an incorrect assumption. It will be interesting to see if it is production again. The V600 is an excellent choice!
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When I got the family 8mm films that my uncle/auntie took converted to DVD I was amazed at the quality and the lack of the black halo round the image you used to get when you projected it. Some of them were over 50 years old but definitely worth doing if you can find someone to do it as it brings memories to life.
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Technically, tape is a superior option due to longevity. However, it’s not something ordinary folks will find comfortable to deal with. If you’re talking about assets designed to survive you, it’s best to find something just about everyone understands.
Clearly, I’m not going to suggest HDDs, although they do have the advantage of price and capacity. A Toshiba X300 Pro 6TB drive costs only $130 and they are available in capacities up to 16TB.
Beyond that, it’s hard to make a recommendation without knowing how much data is involved, in total. If you’re looking at 200 DVDs and they were full, that works out to 1TB. They would all fit on one 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro USB 3.2 thumb drive, about $130. USB thumb drives are a durable format; I expect devices to be able to read them for many decades. They will not be blazingly fast, but if this truly archival material, that’s not essential.
Other than that, I think I’d suggest SSDs in external enclosures. Note that I do not recommend pre-packaged external drives of any type, because they usually have proprietary connections inside. A friend had one of those and the enclosure electronics failed. I thought I would be able to read the drive in my everyday external dock, but it wouldn’t fit.
Just remember that no matter what you choose, the devices need to be refreshed every five years. And they need to be powered up every so often to make sure they’re still alive. For maximum protection, it’s wise to have two archive copies, not just one. If one fails, it’s time to replace both.
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Ok, I went back and followed the whole thread (on initial read I didn’t pay attention to the fact that it was a long thread). And while Will responded after me I completely defer to his opinion as it is informed, as opposed to mine…
Then I just wondered what the internet would say on this. Quick google find a lot on this – I liked this analysis: (from http://www.datarecoveryspecialists.co.uk/blog/the-lifespan-of-hdds-vs-ssds)
“Most people would assume that if you left the device in optimal conditions, in the correct temperature and humidity, then the drive will last forever. This is actually untrue; data stored on a hard disk drive will gradually degrade, and data stored on a solid state drive will actually degrade faster. This is because NAND flash stores data as electrical charges, which leak away quickly in comparison with changes in magnetic domain polarity. In saying this, data on an SSD won’t start degrading for about ten years, although this can vary depending on the type of NAND memory used.
In terms of storage, factors such as temperature and humidity can have a big effect on the lifespan of a drive. Humidity for example can lead to oxidisation of metals inside both hard disk drives and solid state drives. High storage temperatures are particularly problematic for SSDs, as data degradation in flash memory occurs at a faster rate.
For day to day laptop or PC users, you don’t need to worry about the lifespan of your drive, whether it’s an HDD or SSD. With mobile devices that are carried around more, you need to take particular care not to drop them. If you’re looking to store data long term, it might be best to choose an HDD over an SSD.”
Unfortunately I don’t know how old that article is, so the info may be passe… However I think the absolute key advice may be to (a) have several backups and (b) refresh the backups regularly (i.e. at least q5years).
Finding the article on a data recovery service website, this gave me to think of the question, “if you don’t follow that (b) advice and come across your storage device in 20 years, and it’s corrupted, is one more likely to be able to recover from the corruption with a flash or ssd device vs a conventional platter? A recovery service may be able to dismantle the conventional hard drive and rescue information from it (at some extraordinary expense) but can the same happen with solid state?
The final comment would be about ssd or flash drive quality. With the plethora of cheap options around it would be good to know which of the conventional suppliers are offering the best quality product. (I bought, on a lark, a cheap high capacity device which was exactly what one might have predicted – a scam of a poor, unreliable, low capacity piece of silicon (inside a rather nice looking aluminum case) The supplier, and Aliexpress, predicably refused refund. But it was cheap.).
Richard
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I’ve been using Everything for over a year and I am amazed at it’s speed. To use it best, ya gotta have good file and directory names, however, new features are being added all the time, so being able to search on metadata and file contents will probably become a reality.
Everything is working on a find duplicate files function, but I have two other tools to help me cleanup my files…
WhereIsIt (much slower, but much more complete than Everything, and a great dups finder) and Beyond Compare, which allows me to compare directories/folders and files, so I can rid dups and old versions of files, and which is what I also use to backup my files to external media.
I, too, use VueScan and it is very good, especially with my new Canon LIDE flatbed scanner, which is much faster than my old scanners, however, I find myself more and more just taking photos of documents, etc with my Android phone, which has a very good camera.
The latest Beyond Compare allows me to connect my phone to my laptop via USB cable to copy/move files between them, displaying the laptop’s folders/files on one side, the phone’s on the other side of the screen. Beyond Compare, the best money I’ve spent possibly ever.
And with Everything, I no longer spend valuable time in Windows Explorer navigating to a desired file or folder. I just type the name in, in Everything and once the folder is found, right click and select Open Location, which brings up the folder in Windows Explorer.
Powerbasic, no software bloat programming for Windows.
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I don’t know how old that article is
2016. There is an updated version in 2019 that says roughly the same thing. That blog has a lot of “lifetime” articles.
For day to day laptop or PC users, you don’t need to worry about the lifespan of your drive, whether it’s an HDD or SSD.
I don’t buy that. Everyone needs to pay attention to the age of the media that is storing their important data.
My five-year rule’s origin is the US Department of Defense, which long ago did a study to determine how long optical discs could be retained. The result of the study was a rule stating that all DOD material stored on optical discs must be refreshed by copying to new media every five years. That coincided with my own five-year rule regarding HDDs. I’ve had exactly two hard-drive drive failures in 37 years – one a Maxtor drive that died in three (sometime in the ’90s) and the other one a Seagate drive from Onyx, my 2015 DIY build, which died in seven years.
My five-year rule for SSD comes from the fact that it is extremely hard to accurately determine how close to end-of-life it is. There is reserve space on SSDs; once that space is gone because it has been allocated to other parts of the drive that have failed, the drive dies.
That’s why I say five years for everything – and make duplicates.
if you don’t follow that (b) advice and come across your storage device in 20 years, and it’s corrupted, is one more likely to be able to recover from the corruption with a flash or ssd device vs a conventional platter?
If you come across a storage device that is 20 years old and contains important data, you haven’t been doing things right.
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If you come across a storage device that is 20 years old and contains important data, you haven’t been doing things right.
Regretfully there are plenty of things I haven’t done right in my time, and others that I can identify of my friends and colleagues. I’ll wager there are many old drives around that folks will discover they want to ‘investigate’. Hopefully not important ones.
I’ve a stack of old drives around that I’ve stored/piled up: I need to look at them and then do a ‘final discard’. Saved for what I imagine seemed like good ideas at the time. I don’t think any have data on them. I think I had an idea for using the shiny silver platters for artwork…
These days 5 years seems to fly by frighteningly quickly. Covid is now >3 years old…
Richard
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Regretfully there are plenty of things I haven’t done right in my time
Tell me about it.
I’ll wager there are many old drives around that folks will discover they want to ‘investigate’.
I’m sure that’s absolutely right. I’ve got quite a few because I never let them leave my possession unless they are physically destroyed, and in spite of my advice to check on them every so often, I haven’t.
The question that arises out of this thread is should we be replacing internal drives on five-year cycles and extending the life of the workstations?
I can’t answer that question.
You seem to have a very good backup strategy in place, so I think you’ve given yourself good protection that way.
I think your choice at the five-year mark is to decide whether to replace the workstation or upgrade the media. I have a rule about life-extending upgrades based on the age of the system. If the system is 2.5 years old and an upgrade to it costs more than 50% of the cost of a new system, buy the new system. At three years, I drop to 40% and at four, 20%. By five, I’m saying buy a new system.
Part of my strategy is based on a five-year cycle for Windows. Despite Microsoft’s recommended minimum system configurations, I’ve found that Windows needs more and more capacity every year. In effect, my system gets more sluggish with each passing year; at some point, it’s necessary to break that cycle. So given Windows’ five-year cycle and my personal preference for not using media for more than five years, five years is my baseline for everything.
I’m not saying I haven’t broken my own rules, but that’s my target.
In a business setting where one is responsible for many systems, a PC that has failed not only requires a capital expenditure but also lost human time. Afflicted employees’ time is a drain until the resources they need to work are restored. A planned upgrade to a system is thus much less expensive than an emergency replacement.
We are well along on our “Saving history” project.
We have now completed coping files stored on several hundred CD/DVD disks to an external hard drive.
Some of the disks date from the early 1990’s.
So far, no problems with data degradation on the CD/DVDs.
The biggest problem has been opening files created with old software such as Microsoft’s WinFax app. The version of WinFax that resides in our archive in not compatible with Windows 10.
Next step is to recover data files stored on C drivers removed from retired computers. Then 3½-inch floppy disks.
Afraid that data stored on 5¼-inch floppy disks can not be recovered because we do not have a compatible hardware. Fortunately, most of the data stored on the 5¼-inch floppy disks has migrated through various computer replacements and remains available on my workstation.
After coping the archive files to the new external drive, we may want to search for and remove duplicate files.
Since all of the data stored on CD/DVD drives has been recoverable – it brings into question the need to copy the archived files files to a external SSD at all.
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Afraid that data stored on 5¼-inch floppy disks can not be recovered because we do not have a compatible hardware. Fortunately, most of the data stored on the 5¼-inch floppy disks has migrated through various computer replacements and remains available on my workstation.
Sounds like you have no plans to worry about the 5.25″ floppies, but if you did, FWIW I have a floppy drive you can have for the cost of shipping.
I have a few 5.25″ drives, 3.5″ drives, and Iomega ZIP-100 drives I’ve been trying to give away here locally, with no takers. They were bought new long ago but were never used.
Of course, you’ll need a motherboard with the requisite 34-pin floppy interface, but it sounds like you have that if you have computers with 3.5″ floppy drives.
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So far, no problems with data degradation on the CD/DVDs.
So far …
Unless the optical media is specifically identified as archival media, I consider its longevity suspect. I’m not saying it won’t last, I’m only saying that I have lost access to both commercially produced discs and to those that I have written myself. I think the Department of Defense was on to something.
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A final note.
A DVD+ failed to open yesterday.
After allowing File Explorer to work its magic for several hours I gave up and tried to recover the disk using the “free download” of Stellar Data Recovery Pro.
Stellar appeared to work but they wanted $90 before allowing the software to complete the data recovery operation.
Given the choice of spending $90 on software I really do not need or a night out – we went for the night out.
Thank you Will Fastie for triggering my interest in “Saving history.”
Now after a week or playing around, I will move on to other computer related adventures.
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A DVD+ failed to open yesterday.
I’m sorry you encountered a problem, but from my notes above you know I expect this sort of thing.
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