Backing Up Your Digital Photos
Forbes.com has an interesting overview of the perennial problem of backing up your digital photos, including using microfilm (!) which will apparently have a 500 year shelf life. Thanks to Dave Trayers for letting me know about the article.
“But sometimes even 100 years isn’t good enough. Rosenthaler, the Swiss researcher, says he’s currently looking at ways of using microfilm, the old standby of archivists and librarians everywhere, to preserve digital files. Rather than preserving the image itself, Rosenthaler’s proposal is to preserve the individual bits from the image file as a series of light and dark dots indicating the ones and zeros of the file. If properly stored, microfilm could preserve the information for 500 years or so, he says. The method could also be used to preserve music or even video information for centuries in such a way that basic technology like a microscope could be used to assemble the dots into usable data.”