[Leica] Archival storage

[Bill Bain <BBain@IMNET.com>]

Joe wrote:

>Donal,
>You may be right in thinking of digitizing images as a good way of
saving
>them. However, beware of floppies. Data stored on floppies (3.5 or
5.25) has
>a half life of 10 years or less. An optical disk may be truly archival.
>Joe Stephenson

Joe -

Althoough widely used as such, optical is most decidedly not archival.
I beleive that ISO estimates that the shelf live of the media may be
10-20 years, but the biggest problem is not deterioration of the media,
but rather that the data on the media may be in an obsolete format that
the then-current machines cannot read.  This has happened once with
optical disk drives already, fand or other electronic media as well: how
many places can read information that is stored on an 8" floppy disk
now?

Archival prints are probably still the only true long-term storage.

Bill Bain