penfold

Underground and underwater are neither of them recommended storage methods....... but accidents can happen in the best families.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Jim

'They' used to put an image on glass in the photography of yesteryear - I wonder if some boffin could find a way of putting an image(s) on glass discs - unbreakable of course!!

Good morning boys.

Nick Dando

Magneto Optical discs used to be "the" long-term archival data storage method about ten years ago, but they seem to have gone out of fashion. These used to have a "guaranteed" life expectancy of 30 years. They were glass discs in a plastic case, but were write-once read many (or WORM) drives. Good for archiving, but no good if you can't get a device to read them from. But faster, cheaper mass data storage devices have taken over.

Nick

penfold

A life expectancy of 30 years is no good at all if you're talking about film archiving...and as you say, machine compatibility becomes a problem. Hence the reliance on 35 mm film....because it's purely optical, any low power light source can 'read' it, a nineteenth century handcranked projector if necessary.....a slight glitch in preservation doesn't mean the whole is unreadable, as with digital systems; and we know that properly stored, film can survive 100 years plus...Kinetoscope film from 1894 was donated to the National Fairground Archive last year, and is still watchable after conservation and copying.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??