Klas,
I, too, have been working on a project to preserve the past, and
current, for future generations. My focus is on family
documentaries with still photography sound effects and personal
sound bytes, along with story telling--A digital multimedia
adventure. This is, in part, what has brought me to this forum (the
other is recording natural sounds mixed with still photographic
images in an interactive environment).
>From what I have read on the Internet the newer CDs and DVDs are
good for over 100 years, with magnetic tape lasting for 10-20
years. At the rate that computer hard drives crash, I wouldn't bet
on long-term storage there. They are also dependant upon computer
operating systems (another layer to be concerned about). Optical
storage appears to be the most common choice over magnetic media.
I think that the real lifesaver is storing the information in a
common, accepted digital format so that periodic copying will
perpetuate the original data. The movie industry found, almost too
late, that the archived film was rapidly deteriorating and
subsequently we have lost many classic films before they could be
transferred to a digital media with new technology.
With regard to format, I believe that utility software will always
be available to convert or migrate digital encoding to new formats
as they become available. In that way, say 30 years from now,
someone will be able to transfer my sound recorded in WAV on a CD to
the new crystal cube storage, formatted in XJR (hypothetical, of
course).
I do believe that it is most important that we preserve what we care
about. This world changes. Some things will be simply lost forever.
In my 65 years I have seen far too many things disappear. IMHO
getting our precious keepings transferred to digital; be it
photographs or audio is essential to passing our legacy on to future
generations.
That's my opinion.
Bill
http://www.wcmsolutions.com
http://www.experimotion.com
Links that may be of interest on this subject:
http://www.loc.gov/preserv/digital/dp-news.html
http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/digitallongevity.html
http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/desktops/0,39001729,39091141,00
.htm
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/guides/creating_guide/sect14.html
http://phot.epfl.ch/workshop/wks99/3_3.htm
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/publications/1/p1-248-e.html
--- In "dcohen_ohio" <>
wrote:
> Klas wrote:
>
> ... for an "everlasting" format, what would you recommend today?
>
> Klas,
>
> Here is an article from ZD Net entitled "Storage Media Lifespans".
>=20
>
http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/computers/storage/story/0,2000023527,
> 20269043,00.htm
>
> It looks like DVD is the winner with 70 - 100 year life span
closely
> followed by solid state media with 50 - 100 year span.
Surprisingly,
> they claim cdr's are only good for about 10 years. DVD drives and
> dvd media have come down in price a lot over the last year. You
can
> buy an internal dvd burner now for a couple hundred US dollars and
> media cost around $4 per 4.7gb dvd. That's about 9 hours of wav
> recordings at 44.1khz.
>
> Your concern of whether or not there will be devices to play back
> any of the media types we have today is very real. For example, I
> conducted 2 years of songbird point count surveys for the forest
> service in 1990-1991 and in 1999 I went to the forest service to
> obtain the data but it was stored on 5 1/4" floppy discs. I must
> have contacted 10 people before I found a someone that still had
one
> of these drives. Luckily the data was still readable but to think
> that these drives were outdated in only 8 years... Since the movie
> industry has latched on to dvd's, I expect they will be around for
> longer than 8 years from now, but who knows?
>
> Darren Cohen
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