Re: Back-up/Archive of Digital Photographs...Suggestions?

-hh wrote:

Its easy to merely say that we'll just use JPEG or TIFF for our format,
as these will "always" be readable by future image management
applications, or we'll say that we'll use Photoshop for as long as
Adobe is still around.  Regardless of the goodness of such strategies,
they're both assumptions that have to be tested *every* single time you
migrate forward your data to a new PC, new OS or new version Photoshop
(or whatever).

For the naysayers, I keep around a "perfectly preserved" data file from
an old Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.  Its an example of success in
Item #1 above, but failiure in #2.   I keep a copy on my website that I
can point you to and you can try to open the file yourself (drop me an
email).  Its a PPT version 2 file format, dating from only 1989, and
its not like Powerpoint has the excuse that its some obscure backwater
application that was discontinued years ago by its manufacturer....but
backwards-compatibility support quietly disappeared a couple of
PowerPoint revisions ago, which created this "canary in a coal mine"
example.


I agree with your findings regarding MS products.  They commonly
do this to force people to upgrade thus giving them more $.
The difference with jpeg and tiff is that they are open
published formats and you can get open source (free) source
code to read them.  It is safer to stay with open source
formats and code.

The other problem is that Microsoft just won a patent lawsuit
over the FAT file system.  Now we'll probably all pay M$ money
to buy a compact flash card, or a USB disk.  Microsoft might
change the format to force upgrades, like they have done with
numerous other systems, obsoleting the old.  They'll do this
by adding new "features."  I hope the camera
manufacturers adopt a new open source system to force
the issue, while at the same time adopting a more robust
file system (a journaling file system, like ext3).

Roger
.

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