Hard drives crash. CDs and DVDs warp. Companies that store your photos online can go out of business.
Rather than trust his most treasured digital mementos to technology he saw as all-too-fallible, a team led by the University of California, Santa Cruz, economist last month launched a nonprofit he calls the first online storage service to guarantee your data forever.
“People definitely have a false sense of security,” Pommerenke says. “Digital data is fragile. You have to do something active in order to preserve it.”
The era of the analog photo has ended. Just before New Year’s, the last photo lab in the world to process Kodachrome film stopped taking new rolls. That same weekend, Facebook said its users uploaded 750 million photos.
But as our keepsakes all become encoded in bits and bytes, experts agree with Pommerenke that the risk of losing that data to the digital equivalent of a house fire runs higher than losing a shoebox of old prints to the real thing.
Digital preservationists say that no one can really guarantee that data will be preserved forever. Even for a boutique service like Pommerenke’s that aspires to uphold best practices, computers have not existed long enough to be certain. You do the best you can, the experts say, but check back in 100 years.
And the concern does not stop at photos. Audio, video, text, blogs, status updates
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