SAN FRANCISCO — Like every other dad with a digital camera, Kai Pommerenke started taking lots of photos after his daughter was born. But the more he researched, the less convinced he became that he could ensure that those pictures would still be around when she grew up.
Hard drives crash. CDs and DVDs warp. Companies that store your photos online can go out of business.
Rather than trust his most treasured digital mementos to technology he saw as all-too-fallible, a team led by Pommerenke, a University of California, Santa Cruz economist, last month launched a nonprofit he calls the first online storage service to guarantee your data forever.
“People definitely have a false sense of security,” he said. “Digital data is fragile. You have to do something active in order to preserve it.”
The era of the analog photo has ended. Just before New Year’s, the last photo lab in the world to process Kodachrome film stopped taking new rolls. That same weekend, Facebook said its users uploaded 750 million photos.
But as our keepsakes all become encoded in bits and bytes, experts agree with Pommerenke that the risk of losing that data to the digital equivalent of a house fire runs higher than losing a shoebox of old prints to the real thing.
Digital preservationists say no one can really guarantee that data will be preserved forever. Even for a boutique service such as Pommerenke’s that aspires to uphold best practices, computers have not existed long enough to be certain. You do the best you can, the experts say, but check back in 100 years.
Pommerenke’s service, Chronicle of Life, plans to devote the same level of care to personal digital files that large institutions give to their own data.
More than any other measure, digital preservationists cite the importance of keeping multiple copies of data in multiple places. (An initiative led by Stanford University to preserve libraries’ digital data is called LOCKSS: Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.) Even then, relying on only your own media such as hard drives, CDs or flash drives has its pitfalls.
“Time alone is a factor in your data breaking down,” said Bill LeFurgy, who manages digital preservation projects for the Library of Congress. “The lifespan of most physical media is pretty limited.”
