Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever • Hacker News Board

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#51

Post by a_conservative » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #43

I backed up my photos religiously for years. From my first digital camera in like 1995. First to CD-ROMs, then DVD-ROMs, then hard drives, and I included online backups to Google Cloud (real backups via arq, not Google Photos). My arq bot was running on my 2014 Intel Macbook Pro which would read the photos off my home server and back them up. (the server also being a local backup). Then I got my M1 Mac and IIRC, arq…

This is just a guess, but I bet if your grandma's photo books had some sort of narration or her personal notes, you would have valued them more.

I've sometimes passed on sentimental keepsakes, only to long for them later. What seems pointless yesterday, suddenly has new meaning as I get older and gain new perspectives. In particular, my Mom passed a few years ago, and there are questions I wish I could go back and ask now that some time has passed. There are items I tossed that I wish I had at least snapped a picture of them for reference. I didn't understand the significance of certain documents in the moment.

Maybe the answer is to pick out stories that are important and include some sort of narration. Maybe the answer is to throw away the pictures without meaning and savor the ones with meaning, and make sure that meaning is recorded for your kids.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#52

Post by squeedles » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #43

I backed up my photos religiously for years. From my first digital camera in like 1995. First to CD-ROMs, then DVD-ROMs, then hard drives, and I included online backups to Google Cloud (real backups via arq, not Google Photos). My arq bot was running on my 2014 Intel Macbook Pro which would read the photos off my home server and back them up. (the server also being a local backup). Then I got my M1 Mac and IIRC, arq…

I have a digital archive of photos going back to the 1930s, and have physical archives of negatives and slides preserved properly. Not everything is scanned, but it will probably remain on my "to do" list permanently. B/W 114 negs from my grandfather contain many unidentified and unidentifiable people, but there are also views of where I grew up 90 years ago.

I agree with you that a certain portion of images are no longer meaningful, but it's tough to say a-priori what those are. So keep them all. The real problem is that photos often have notes on the back, but digital images rarely have any metadata.

I foresaw this problem back in 2002 and have been using a time-oriented naming convention and keeping little XML files with notes. I posted a little rant about it back in the day and made some simple tooling, which has been good enough to keep some basic notes with my photos.

https://pixtag.org/

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#53

Post by TacticalCoder » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

8fingerlouie wrote: post #29

Except, they're not. They're in iCloud, backed up to my NAS at home, backed up to another cloud vendor, backed up to two different external hard drives, stored in separate locations, as well as archived on Blu-Ray M-Disc media, also identical copies, stored next to the external hard drives. They're not exactly "great quality" most of them, us being early adopters of digital cameras (2000'ish), so 1.5 megabit, up to 3…

> Blu-Ray M-Disc

Any brand/size of discs you recommend?

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#54

Post by hnbear » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

I've very carefully hoarded photos. I don't miss the photos, but I really miss the meta-data, more-so for scanned real photos. I loved photography back in the day, and so took a lot of film photos. Even having scanned them in I've ended up with meta-data around the scan or import date, rather than actual data.

And, anything from a digital camera will be missing things like GPS location, which phones include and I think is great. I've used location search so many times to find photos. I can't always remember when we went somewhere, but pretty often someone will ask about a photo from a trip to X place, and then location search finds it easily.

Photos themselves have bounced between iPhoto, Aperture, Photos, etc but largely remained intact.

The library is backed up to the usual 3 places: a local server (nightly rsync to a ZFS array), stored in iCloud, and in Backblaze, so hopefully safe. And of course, all are on my laptop too.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#55

Post by jagged-chisel » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:53 PM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #23

"Probably" is doing a lot of heavylifting there. Digital backup discipline for consumers emerged way before digital cameras. We used to have backups in floppies, and then CD-R's, which were common and made physical backups very cheap. Not just data, we had to back up software too because we didn't have an app store to reinstall them from. In the late 90's, advent of MP3 also made people focus more on digital backup s…

> … digital backup discipline for consumers …

You have a lot more faith in typical consumers than I do. I wouldn’t call any of those I knew in the 90s/00s “disciplined” with data backups, let alone the wherewithal to have considered software backups.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#56

Post by specproc » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:07 AM UTC

Back in the late noughties, my Dad had a NAS. I had a pretty chaotic life at the time and a big stash of old pics on a hard drive I knew could die at any point.

Dad offers to keep them for me. He's a sensible, stable chap. "Sure I say", and do a full backup of my old pictures and crap to his NAS.

Five years later, the HD is long dead, I'm more together and putting together a fresh setup. I recall the backup and figure I'll merge it with my current files.

He has no memory of the backup, nor ability to find it.

FML. Worst. Backup strategy. Evar.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#57

Post by fmajid » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:23 AM UTC

iberator wrote: post #40

Dork1234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to SmugMug, need to give credit to them for saving it.

Whats smug mug?

A paid photo hosting service that bought out Flicker, which would otherwise have been shuttered.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#58

Post by mysteria » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

andix wrote: post #35

mysteria wrote: post #32

Keep 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.

After I got my server going I transferred all my photos over and ran a utility overnight to check them for corruption, the name escapes me but it was an open source cli program. A small number of images were corrupted and the majority were replaced with thankfully pristine backup copies. The rest were restored with minor visual glitches.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#59

Post by 8fingerlouie » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:59 AM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #53

8fingerlouie wrote: post #29

Except, they're not. They're in iCloud, backed up to my NAS at home, backed up to another cloud vendor, backed up to two different external hard drives, stored in separate locations, as well as archived on Blu-Ray M-Disc media, also identical copies, stored next to the external hard drives. They're not exactly "great quality" most of them, us being early adopters of digital cameras (2000'ish), so 1.5 megabit, up to 3…

> Blu-Ray M-Disc Any brand/size of discs you recommend?

I've been using Verbatim all these years, but truth be told, I'm considering stopping.

Blank media is becoming harder and harder to come by, and prices have increased to 2-4x of what they were.

For now at least, I have enough media to fill out the next couple of years, 1 year per 100GB disc, and we'll see where we are by then. My prediction is that it won't be any easier to archive to optical media by then. If you need proof, just check your local DVD/Blu-Ray vendor for latest copies of movies/shows.

I know Sony and others are working on 1TB size discs, but they're all "enterprise archiving", so probably not within price range of consumers.

Re: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

#60

Post by m463 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

robrain wrote: post #16

m463 wrote: post #5

I think things like text messages and related memories are being lost because companies like apple jealously prevent exporting and saving. (camera roll allows export) Lots of relatives lost a phone or access to an account and with it, all photos from friends, text messages to deceased loved ones, and more. all this stuff should be exportable to multiple places for lots of backups on all kinds of media.

Messages, select user, click the user icon to get to the info page, click Photos, Edit, Select, Download -> photos are in the Photos app and you can do what you want with them. Not the easiest operation, but hardly jealously prevented.

yes, photos/camera roll is ok... if you mount an iphone as a usb device you get the DCIM/IMG_0000.jpg kind of thing.

But text messages are jealously guarded and not exportable. Apple does this for itself, not its users.