Long-term (a few decades?) archival of digital family photos?

In My Humble Opinion
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1

I have about 500 GB worth of digital photos currently backed up in Google Photos and Dropbox that I’m trying to offload to physical media in order to save some money. I plan on making a few copies of them to keep in different family members’ houses.

But with optical media on its way out, I’m not sure what the best physical media to store them on would be?

M-Disc seemed like the best medium for archival, but it seemed like the company that manufactures most of them (Verbatim?) got sold and the new ones aren’t of the same quality anymore, and it’s dubious whether they are any more resilient than regular Blu-Ray discs to begin with. They are expensive and it’s increasingly hard to find readers & writers for them; I worry that they (and optical drives in general) will be completely obsolete in a few more years.

Something USB/USB-C based would probably be easier to read in the future.

Portable SSDs at first seemed easiest (and cheap enough), but apparently the magnetic bits on them will degrade over time (5+ years) if they are not powered-on regularly and allowed to go through their idle refresh cycles. That’s not something I can count on happening, especially the copies stored at family members’ houses.

What about just a bunch of cheap 1 TB portable HDDs? I’m hoping that at least one copy will survive for a few decades, long enough for the last of us to die (none of the current generation will have kids anyway, so it won’t matter after that).

Do I need to RAID them, or is that overkill? Seems like for the same money, I could just buy extra HDDs instead and manually make extra copies. For the most part, this sort of archival is something I’d only do once a decade or so — I’d offload all the existing Google Photos to physical media, store the next decade’s worth online, and then do it again in 10 years, etc. That means I don’t need to worry about updating the physical archive with new photos, except in giant batches every few years.

Any other ideas that’s not prohibitively expensive? Trying to keep it under $100/copy, 3-4 copies max, so I can’t probably justify exotic tape drives or anything like that. These are just sentimental family photos & videos of moderate value; we’d be sad but not devastated if they were lost.

2

For long term archive of those photos, it seems like the cost of cloud storage would be worth it. It’s like $100/year for 2TB of storage. And the cost per TB will likely keep going down over time. Keeping things on physical media is going to have all kinds of real world issues like the cost of media, the media failing, the format becoming unsupported, losing the media, etc. If it’s in the cloud, all the relatives have access to the photos and can upload more.

It can still be a good idea to download everything locally, but it doesn’t seem like you really need to do all the stuff with RAID and having backups at remote locations. Rather than trying to get media which lasts decades, you could go with a bunch of cheap backups. Ask your relatives for their old drives and make lots of backups. If a few fail, oh well, you have a bunch of other backups.

3

I wouldn’t bank on that too much: standards do change over time. Though USB is so common that converter adaptors will probably be available for quite a while as things evolve.

I’m not sure SSDs have been around long enough to allow reliable estimates of their lifespan.
Nitpick: they actually use trapped electrical charge, not magnetic storage. Which is probably more susceptible to leakage degradation.

HDDs have moving parts of course, though if you leave them powered off they will last longer.
I’d have to do some research to find data about this…

As for RAID, I have never been a fan. It seems to me to be an unreasonable amount of added complexity for not very much additional storage per dollar. Just make duplicate copies, as you say.

4

The phrase ‘the cloud’ gets used a lot these days… but which cloud?

It’s not as if there is any global ‘cloud’: just a number of competing providers.

How many of those companies are still going to be in business in 20 or 30 years time?
And how many will be willing or able to retrieve 30 year old files?

Not to mention the unsupported format issue, though that’s a different topic from the storage method.

5

How about buying a new external drive every second year or so, and copying the files to it? Right now, you can get a conventional hard drive or an SSD with sufficient capacity for a hundred bucks or so, and as new technologies and interfaces emerge, you can switch to those. Note that you can’t just stick a single drive in a drawer for twenty years and forget about it; you need to actively check on the copy and move to new technologies over time.

6

Right, the idea of making a backup, then stashing it away indefinitely as an archive is rather unrealistic. In fact, how many people ever even check their backups?

Sigh… mostly guilty as charged, myself…

7

I’ve done this with a few audio interviews of my parents: upload to archive.org with appropriate (searchable) descriptions.

For photos, I’ve been attaching to relevant people on WikiTree and FamilySearch.

8

Any of the major cloud storage providers like Google, Microsoft and Dropbox will likely be around for a very long time. If they were to go out of business, there would likely be a lot of advanced notice and another cloud provider would take over their storage. Anyone using the service would have time to move their data to another provider if they wanted. Many of the services have automated ways to pull files from other cloud storage providers. Certainly any of them could go out of business, but it’s pretty unlikely that you’d wake up one day to find that a service like Dropbox had suddenly closed down and the data was no longer available. As for retrieving really old files, I would hope they’d be able to retrieve any file even if it was on tape at an off-site location.

One thing also to consider is that your relatives may not be as tech savvy as you. And that may get worse over time. Doing things like backups, rotating drives, and maintaining a RAID box is already out of the reach for many people. With cloud storage, someone else worries about all of that stuff. Nana won’t have lookup how to do a hotswap of a failing drive in the basement storage server.

9

Also, if you drop dead tomorrow, are your family members going to have access to your cloud storage account?

10

In the case of using cloud storage to store family photos, the relatives can be granted access to the storage. They can be given the authority to just view the files or to also have the ability to modify the storage. If the account owner were to die, the other relatives would still have access to the photos and could move them somewhere else even if they just had view-only access. And similar to other accounts the decedent might have, the storage services may allow an executor to take over the account as part of the probate process.

11

Though advance planning is a good idea.

12

Pick one. Doesn’t really matter IMO, although using something like Google Photos has the advantage of being easily shared with people.

The point with digital archiving of home stuff isn’t so much to save it and forget it, but to rather spread it around- give copies to relatives, save it in the cloud, and save it locally. And use something like Backblaze on your local machine as backup. Ideally, maybe a couple of cloud providers- like whoever your phone uses, as well as a dedicated one.

That way, if something does happen, you’ve got multiple options for recovery.

And yes, in theory you’ll need to periodically convert them into the format du jour, but I’m not convinced that JPG is realistically going to be superseded as a common image in any realistic future time frame. Even if they come up with a better format, JPG decoding is going to be something that’s trivial for future systems to do.

It’s a difference in strategy; old photo negatives lasted forever, but generally there was ONE copy, and someone had to keep track of it. And prints eventually deteriorate. With digital stuff, they don’t deteriorate, but there’s a little more effort in making sure they don’t just vanish. But the tradeoff is that if you do it right, it’s more robust, and 40 years from now, they’ll look just as good as the day they were taken, unlike a 3x5 print of some random family photo.

13

I’m going to come at this from a different direction. The question asked is about saving the images so they are still available in several decades. A very important thing to consider is sorting the photos so they are also useful in the future.

500GB of photos will be many thousands of images, and unless they are organized in some fashion, it is going to be impossible to do much of anything with them. They need to be organized in some manner so in 20 years somebody can say “are there any pictures of Aunt Shyanne as a kid?” and get a useful response. At some point AI tools may be able to help (or solve) this, but at the moment they are just not good enough to depend on.

If they are organized with a tool that saves the metadata externally, there is a low chance that tool will be available decades later. The only options I think are viable are, in order of my preference are:

  1. Storing tags and other data directly in EXIF information in the files. As long as there are tools to read jpeg, heic, or camera raw files, there will be tools to read the EXIF data in those files.
  2. Sort the images in to directories based on content and context. Deduplication can allow the same file to exist in multiple directories without using additional space. This does require using a file system more sophisticated than FAT.
  3. Rename the files from DSC12345.JPG to Shyanne at prom.jpg.

As for how to actually store them, I think the only solution is to keep the files “live”, and move them to new systems as you upgrade and migrate your other data. For example, they live on the house NAS with everything else, are backed up along with the house NAS, and when the NAS is replaced, are moved to the new one.

14

I don’t use cloud storage for several reasons. One, since I have about a half-petabyte of (mostly) video files, this would be prohibitive in cost, and I would have to provide for continuous payment if something happened to me.

Using RAID-style storage is good for size, but the proprietary nature of it makes future readability problematical. Thumbdrives and SSD drives are still too expensive for now.

So, for now, the best option for me is to store on multiple standalone (spinning) hard drives. Sure, it takes multiple ones for my data collection, which I have to handle.

Documentation is paramount. I am writing down – on paper, then transferring to computer doc – what I am storing, where, and trying to organize it while thinking about future access. This covers a lot of ground – disk formatting, file organization, file/folder names, and more.

Archiving alone is a major task. And I am still adding to the collection.

15

Hmm, ok, thanks for the thoughts, all! I’ll probably end up going with the “quantity, not quality” approach:

etc.

These aren’t super critical photos, and I don’t want to spend too much of my life and time managing them all the time. Once every 3-5 years or so I can probably handle. Every few months is too often.

It’s probably going to be an “yes, and” situation, where I add physical backups on top of the existing cloud ones. I’m just trying to downsize what I keep in the cloud, not move off of it altogether, and limit to the stuff I care about the most.

The offline backup is where I’ll keep the rest of it… old college photos of people I haven’t talked to in decades, long-separated exes, blurry cell phone photos I never bothered to delete, etc.

The idea is that I’ll keep the critical albums intact across one or more cloud providers, while the less-critical ones can be offloaded to offline media to save ongoing monthly storage costs.

In having downloaded all my Google Photos (via Takeout), I noticed that there were a lot of duplicates and random videos. I’ve re-encoded all the videos to a more modern codec, will run a visual de-dupe on the photos, and then save them to a couple of cheap HDDs that I’ll refresh every few years. Then I can delete from cloud storage, keeping only the good stuff online.

Google has the concept of an inactive account manager… a few months after I die, or maybe upon a death certificate, a few of my family and friends should get access to everything. Having a physical backup might make that easier too, as long as they can find it in my messy house.

Hmm, true, but that reminds me that we should make a photo book of all the good stuff too, just to have a non-digital copy if the world ends. And that way Shutterfly would also save a copy of the photos.

Hmm, good point. It looks like the Takeout stuff comes with a bunch of .JSONs for each photo that have the auto-detected people names in them… but not pets, for some reason :frowning:

Nonetheless, the AI tagging stuff is getting pretty good, and it shouldn’t be hard to train it on a few face examples and have it auto-categorize the rest. They’re mostly well geocoded, too, so I can search by time & place as well.

16

Oh sure. I’m just saying that in some cases, all we’ve got in the way of old photos are prints from say… 1962, and they’re starting to turn weird colors and get brittle, etc… Even some of the prints I’ve got that I took as recently as 1998 are starting to visibly deteriorate.

Meanwhile, the digital photos I have from a scant 2-3 years later look exactly like the day I took them, because they ARE exactly like the day I took them. And they’ll stay that way, as long as I am moderately conscientious about making sure they’re all transferred, etc…

17

Closing the gate after the animals left, but part of the problem is that we need to learn to cull aggressively, as soon as possible.

Right after a vacation or an event we tend to carefully handle each of our hundreds of photos as if it were one of our children, but ten years later they are just sitting there occupying gigabytes of space and not being viewed by anyone.

Who needs 80 different shots of the same soccer game your kid was in ten years ago, in RAW and JPEG? There are probably 3 or 4 keepers in that lot, many duplicates, and many ho-hum photos. Get rid of the ones that wouldn’t be worthy of a printed album.

I realize this is super hard to do, and “photo proliferation” is one of the reasons I went back to film–it forces me to do everything at a more measured pace, producing fewer images.

18

I just don’t really have the patience for that anymore :slight_smile: Used to, when I had a DSLR and worked in Lightroom for hours after every outing, but it’s just too much of a hassle to bother with, especially with all my shitty cell phone pics.

Thankfully, the AIs are getting better at that all the time. My phone already shoots several and picks the best one. Google Photos will likewise suggest discarding blurry ones and help you pick the right one and auto adjust higlights etc.

By the time I feel inclined to look at these again, I can probably just go “Hey ChatGPT, make me a slideshow of the early 2000s” and a few seconds later it’ll create a virtual museum for me to walk through with all the best pictures and smells and sounds to accompany them. Not too worried about the curation, just keeping the pixels around long enough for AI to process all of it in a few more years…

19

Now that’s a cool idea, and I imagine that Lightroom and Photos on my Mac will soon have exactly that kind of AI feature: smart culling. I’m all for that.

I scoffed at the AI features of Lightroom when it cropped up in a “new features” popup. Then I did a photo shoot at the little school where my daughter teaches at–we did School Picture Day–and as I was working through seventy different photos in Lightroom, dreading the time I would have to spend fixing up stains on shirts and removing glare from my umbrella lights from glasses, I decided to give Generative AI a chance.

And what an amazing tool it was. I always have the kids sit in a folding chair in front of my backdrops, but some kids are skinny and the weatherbeaten folding chair shows from behind them. It took seconds to have AI select the chair and replicate the pattern of the backdrop, seamlessly.

I’m not a fan of creating photos with AI, but as the smarter cousin of the “heal” brush, it is an absolute win for me.

Now I need to shoot a roll of B&W film to get that bad taste of digital photos out of my mouth :slight_smile:

20

I’m in the group that would suggest a two-disc NAS with RAID 1. They’re not really that expensive if you only have < 1TB. Virtually all of them will notify you if one drive starts failing and you can then replace it and rebuild the storage pool. I started with HDDs and then migrated to SSDs. Eventually, I’ll probably migrate to NVMes…and then to whatever is “next generation.”

The NAS units I have also allow me to connect an external USB drive and the firmware will automatically mirror the contents of the storage pool to the USB drive periodically. That way, all three drives would have to fail at about the same time before I lose the data.

I can also mirror the data to cloud storage automatically, but I’m not doing that at present.