With proper care film will last many decades if not centuries. Will digital images last that long? It’s a big question.

Just about every day when I’m in my office I scan photos. Hundreds upon hundreds over time turn to thousands. It’s just part of my workflow. I write and when I hear my scanner stop I put in a new set of slides or film. Some of the film I’m scanning now is as much as 40 years old.

Not long ago I thought I was done scanning, after my own 40,000 racing images were scanned, but now I am acquiring other even larger collections.

As I began a completely new backup regime today (thank you Amazon Cloud) it made me wonder where these now digitized images will end up 40 years from now or beyond?

Film or prints are fairly durable things. They can last many decades. Digital files? It remains to be seen. How long will a CD or DVD be readable? No one knows for sure. I know a few of the CDs I burned 15 years ago as backups are no longer readable. External hard drives? Don’t even get me started.

Is online backup the answer? Maybe, maybe not. I know personally I lost nearly two years of images because I depended solely on a single online backup method (Carbonite). I didn’t understand the details of how its backups worked and when an external hard drive failed I found to my horror that the files I thought had been archived on Carbonite weren’t.

The problem was I routinely removed the files from my laptop after they’d been backed up, thinking I was fine with the online backup. However if you read the small print with Carbonite (as with other services I’m sure) what you’ll find is that if you delete files from your computer Carbonite thinks you no longer want those files, so after 30 days they delete them too.

This happened to me a couple of years back and I’m just now getting enough distance on it to be able to talk about it without wanting to smash something (preferably a Carbonite server…. kidding, just kidding!).

The point being – my negatives and prints have survived just fine in big Rubbermaid boxes all these many decades. Will my digital images have that long of a life? — Larry Lawrence