It's sad that Flickr doesn't get a mention in that story. The photos I have from that 2000s era are still around purely thanks to that site.
Thanks to SmugMug, need to give credit to them for saving it.
Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#32Keep in mind bitrot is a real thing if you roll your own storage. While most cloud storage solutions store multiple copies of your data I'm not sure if all of them have a system that checks for and fixes bitrot.
I love my ZFS server as it handles all that transparently but that's really not an option for everyone.
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#33Hard problem to solve as I guess people dont like the idea generally of spending $100 a year or so on an online backup plus have a physical backup.
Even though back in the day you would spend that on film and development as a light photo taker.
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#34The digital photos are not my issue. Especially in the early 2000s the files were really small, super easy to copy. I've always moved them to a new laptop, I guess I have at least 8 copies lying around in different places.
More problematic are the first analog videos from the 80s, the magnetic tape now starts to rot, and it's not that easy to copy those.
I also have film from the 60s and 70s, this is slowly becoming an issue too. But honestly I don't care that much about those past memories from my parents and grandparents.
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#35Keep in mind bitrot is a real thing if you roll your own storage. While most cloud storage solutions store multiple copies of your data I'm not sure if all of them have a system that checks for and fixes bitrot. I love my ZFS server as it handles all that transparently but that's really not an option for everyone.
I think I have some bitrot in my photo collection, there are a few pictures that seem to be broken, but it's far less than 1%. I'm fine with it. I could probably restore most of those images if I tried.
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#36Sad, really. My high school years were all on MySpace and I haven't seen them since. It did make me get more serious about personal data preservation as an adult though, so it's not all bad. And maybe some of those haircuts were better left to history.
Same here. I wish I could get the MySpace photos back. Alas, login has been scrubbed on their site
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Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#37I've got plenty of pictures from that era, all carefully copied from disk to disk. Analogue pictures instead are more scarce (were costly to produce) and harder to archive
Analog pictures are really easy to keep in good shape. I have a family album that is more than 100 years old now, those pictures are still fine. The first color pictures from the 60s got a weird tint though. But nobody knows how good the colors were in the first place.
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#38shrug
I got my first digital camera in 2001 and still have all the photos from then as well as all the images I downloaded from the internet starting from 1991 through Usenet groups.
I scanned all of my dad's old photos going back to 1965 and have our family photos going back to the 1930's.
Everything is backed up twice and verify every file checksum twice a year.
I know not everyone is a computer expert but 1) we are on Hacker News 2) prebuilt NAS systems have a lot of these features now and can backup to another unit.
Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
#39On the whole, I consider myself lucky to have lost data due to a badly configured 40GB HDD early in my digital life. I was so aggrieved that it inoculated me against data preservation complacency, and in the subsequent 25 years I haven’t lost a single byte. As they say, every safety regulation is written in blood.
I had the opposite reaction. Realised the futility of data retention. Stopped backing up and let it flap into the wind if that’s the way the dice rolls. There’s always more data. Losing data now is relieving, like closing a chapter in a good book.
Same here. Only memory remains :)