Alan Browne wrote:


In 500 years, a lot ( say 0.0001% ) of the digital photography of today
will be available to future historians. It will be very well documented
in many cases. Those who preserve the data well will be more likely to
document it well.

And yes, I know common CD/DVD ROMs don't last more that 5 - 10 years,
but there are other archival media that will easily do 200 years. Some
of that will survive much longer.



If anything, MOST of the digital images shot today will disappear in 10
years or less. I highly doubt very many people do any sort of archival
storage and since very few people even make prints, most of the images
from this "digital age" won't be around for anyone to see even one
generation from now. At least with film people HAD to make prints and
unless you intentionally throw them away or otherwise destroy them, they
are still around many years later.

If I had even $1 for each time I heard someone say "My computer
crashed and I lost all the pictures of my children" etc. And if you
think a computer 500 years from now will understand digital data from
today... I'd be shocked if even 50% of people have anything other than
the copy on their hard drive for a back up, much less a "200 year
archival" form.

http://www.archivaladvisor.org/shtml...digmedia.shtml

While some disks may claim "Archival for 300 years", until they have
actually done this, IMHO it's just marketing... With B&W and even RA4
prints, we know in RL aging what we can expect.

Stephanie