Two hard drives is a usable minimum, but I have my photos on at least three: my desktop PC, the external USB hard drive that backs up my PC, and an 8TB drive that backs up three external hard drives. If you want to keep photos for 50 years, you might have to store them on roughly 10 hard drives in all.īecause a hard drive can fail at any time, it’s not enough to store your photos on a single drive. However, it’s a good rule of thumb that a drive is increasingly likely to fail after five years or 50,000 hours of use. Some drives fail after a few months while others work for a decade or more. Recently, I had a 1TB PC hard drive fail after four years, and a 2TB external USB hard drive failed after seven years. The one thing we know about hard drives is that most of them fail sooner rather than later. In simpler times we had photos developed and printed on a regular basis - but they were still vulnerable to irreparable damage. Second, you may have to keep converting documents to whichever file format becomes dominant before the old one is abandoned. First, you have to keep moving the data to new storage systems before the old one fails or becomes unreadable. Making digital documents last for ever therefore involves two processes. jpg/jpeg picture file format developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group may well last “for ever” despite efforts to replace it with JPEG 2000, PNG (Portable Network Graphics), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), SPIFF (Still Picture Interchange File Format), BPG (Better Portable Graphics), FLIF (Free Lossless Image Format), HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format, aka HEIC in Apple’s iOS 11), and Google’s WebP, among others. Operating systems, software and file formats also keep changing, so being able to see a file doesn’t mean you can load it. The photos might be safe but I won’t know unless I buy something that can read them. I still have data on 8in, 5.25in and 3.5in floppy disks, Iomega Zip disks and quarter-inch tapes.
To be really safe, you should have more than one copy of each photo, stored in more than one way in more than one place.ĭigital data is a particular problem because storage formats change all the time.
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