At midnight all your digital images turn into pumpkins

I paraphrased the title from someone's posting on a message board.

Digital Railroad goes out of business

Many pro photographers relied on Digital Railroad to upload, sell and archive their images. Think of it as Flickr for pros. All that ends tomorrow night when the servers get shut down with very little notice for their customers. One of the biggest draws to DRR was archival, and I'm sure some pros relied on it solely to backup at least some of their photos because they thought it would always be there. Now users are frantically trying to download their own images before everything goes dark.

To me this is another indication of a problem with digital. Digital files just don't last. CD's and DVD's degrade over time, companies that are paid to maintain files go out of business... Nobody has really come up with a good solution for long-term digital archival.

Yes I know negatives can get burned in a fire or lost as well. Really the argument is no matter what medium you use to store your photos make sure it's secure, because you never know...

Digital is more of a concern for me because generally with negatives you also have prints. Many old photographs people have lying around are prints only, the negs are long gone. If digital photos only stay on your hard drive or online through websites and email then it's more likely they will be gone at some later date.

WOW. You and Nando posted similar things. Kind of funny haha.

Digital archiving is not a good business to get into. I think that we'll see more of this sort of thing.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences found that a digital movie master costs $12,514 per year for reliable storage. On the other hand, reliable storage for a film movie master costs only $1059. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. If everything is done digitally - e.g. audio, on-set photographs, scripts, etc. the cost of preservation then balloons to $208,569 per year. However, with film photographs, written scripts, conventional audio recordings, etc., it would only add an additional $486 to store that stuff with the film masters.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html

Cujo wrote:WOW. You and Nando posted similar things. Kind of funny haha.

Yah, but I beat him by 20 minutes. He copied me!

Both posts demonstrate the danger with using digital for archiving but there are two different stories here.

I still beat you.

Though to be fair I learned everything I know about going back to film from you