As long as you copy them to a new machine every 5-10 years or so, yes. That’s what I have done.
Exactly my point (and Steve McCurry’s).
Computers now are a much more mature and stable format than they were 30 years ago. I’m pretty sure you can pop a hard drive from 20 years ago into a computer and have it mount with little problem. Besides, if you aren’t monitoring your system for failures over 50 years, you aren’t taking advantage of digitals benefits.
The standard of “stick it somewhere” for 50 years isn’t a reasonable standard. It’s almost certain that moisture, mold, dampness, fire, animals, misplacement, dropping, etc. will damage the negatives, not to mention the inherent degradation of the media. Off the top of my head, the NFL doesn’t have the original broadcast of the first superbowl and Nasa lost a bunch of moon pictures. That almost certainly isn’t going to happen in the digital age.
Oh, I think there’s very little here that we disagree on.
And, yet, I can go through my grandpa’s shoebox, and find negs from the 30s and 40s I can scan and print today without any problem.
All of those things will also damage computers over time.
The whole point with digital images is that it’s not tied to a specific piece of hardware. You move the bits around, keep them current. If you leave them on an old disk you deserve what you get, and I agree it’s probably worse than storing negatives.
Makes me think of an Aussie couple I met last year in Vietnam. They’d kept all their wedding photos on their PC – which was subsequently stolen in a burglary. The only ones they had left are copies of the few sent to their families.
That’s why I keep two separate backups at home, one locked in a safe, plus one backup off-site. And I’m spending quite a few hours digitizing my negs and slides, both for “computer darkroom” processing (I don’t have the space for a wet darkroom) and for additional safety.
But being a “belt and suspenders” type of guy, I don’t trust digital storage. It hasn’t been around long enough to prove its longevity. Film has. Film has been around for 100 years, and we know that if it’s treated reasonably it’ll last for multiple decades. That, and the fact that very few burglars would bother stealing my negative binders but might very well take all my computer stuff if they could, is one of the reasons that I’m still trying to get some shots on film once in a while. That, and of course, the personal satisfaction of using precision engineering like the classic Nikons. Heck, if I could afford it, I’d probably get myself a Leica M4 just for the sheer fun and for no rational reason at all.
There is some high-end photographer who advertises on WGBH radio as “still using film” so they are out there, but it has become rare enough to be a marketing tool.
True, but data is not hardware. One thing you can do with data that you can’t do with physical media is back up information using a redundant system.