How to keep a legacy of photo images after death?

[mrlynn]

Do magneto-optical drives still exist? At one point they were considered the most stable form of long-term archiving.

/Mr Lynn

[jdc]

SSDs seem like overkill.

For the cost of one SSD you could a half dozen 64 GB thumb drives and send them to all the relatives and have one in a box.

Flickr offers 1TB of free storage, open a couple of accounts for multiple backups and upload away. Slide shows built in and you can easily sort at a later date.

All that other stuff sounds liek too much work.

Sorry to hear about your family member.

[sekker]

Sorry to hear about your family member. Cancer is hard.

I would do this simply - get a couple USB external hard drives and mail the files to a few family members, Surely someone has backup room to add these to a central repository.

And once one family member has the copy, they can ship the drive to another.

I don't trust DVDs or flash, I've gone with RAID 1 storage for critical archives. Hard drives include the reader built-in.

[Article Accelerator]

Ombligo wrote: He wondered about DVD's and I said it was dying technology, plus they are prone to damage.

You might consider these:

http://www.mdisc.com

"A thousand years…"

[mrlynn]

Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=Ombligo]He wondered about DVD's and I said it was dying technology, plus they are prone to damage.

You might consider these:

http://www.mdisc.com

"A thousand years…"
Sounds promising; maybe the successor to the magneto-optical drive? I never tried those, because the drives (and media) were very expensive. But most computer optical drives can write and read these M-discs; see here:

http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/

Of course optical drives are on the way out, so where will that leave the M-discs? The company points out in their FAQ that their media will last long enough that when a robust replacement technology comes along, you can transfer to that.

/Mr Lynn

[D. Lawson]

jdc wrote:
SSDs seem like overkill.

For the cost of one SSD you could a half dozen 64 GB thumb drives and send them to all the relatives and have one in a box.

What? No. An (internal) 128 GB SSD costs the same as two 64 GB thumb drives these days.

[deckeda]

I like the idea of sending some flash or USB drives to multiple family members. With a 40GB archive, I'm betting much of it hasn't been edited or culled for keepers, if that's a goal. And having many hands willing and able to help could be beneficial for that and the redundant copies are a very good idea.

Good digital prints, for some of the "selects" (you'll recognize the old newspaper reference ...) made on Fuji archival paper will go a long way toward satisfying the analog -- and usability -- aspect.

[mrlynn]

I'd say forget about flash or hard drives, and try those M-discs. Distribute those to the family, and you're all set for 1,000 years!

/Mr Lynn

[Robert M]

Ombligo,

I was recently asked a similar question. Here is what I did:

1. Had the complete set of images turned into high quality hard copy photos. Single photos. At least three sets, stored in three different locations. This makes it very easy to scan photos in the event of a disaster.

2. Had the entire set of images copied onto flash drives. Original quality, not compressed medium or low quality jpegs or anything like that. These were then distributed to family members. Easy access to make more copies both digital and physical.

3. Threw the entire set onto several hard disk drives. Distributed to family members who have a clue as to what to do with them. Easy access to make more copies both digital and physical.

4. turned them into sets of DVDs. Distributed to family members. Easy access to make more copies both digital and physical.

5. Three very nice high quality photo books. Distributed in various places.

6. Cloud storage via at least one reputable service.

I don't know how much it cost them to do this nor how long it took them to complete the job but it seems to me that price and time wasn't a concern. To them, they were a non-issue when it came to ensuring the photos survived even the worst of disasters. I'm not sure you need to go as far as they did but I know they're happy with the result.

Robert

[N-OS X-tasy!]

freeradical wrote:
Multiple approaches...yes

Make a password protected .zip file or something. Split the file into a bunch of smaller binary segments, and generate PAR2 files for the data segments. Upload to an unloved binaries group on Usenet. My Usenet provider - Astraweb - has 2115 days of retention...

So many things wrong with this suggestion.

1) Put private family images on Usenet for public consumption?
2) Who will be responsible for teaching the family members about the ins and out of Usenet? About how to find the photos? Of ensuring access for every family member?

Unloved or otherwise, a public Usenet group is not the solution to this problem. Why wouldn't a shared folder on Dropbox serve the purpose just as well, as not better?