Coming Back Full Circle to Film and Paper

Although I do think the stability of storage is something to ponder, one can easily make multiple back-ups to assuage any fears of data loss. Also compare one DVD-rom full of images to a stack of equivalent film or photos and the required space requirements, let alone the ease of organization with digital. As technology progresses, one can also move it off optical to the latest-&-greatest without quality loss. The other major benefit of digital is metadata. The moment a digital photo is taken, you have the time, data, & camera settings stamped on the image, and if you take a little more time you can also add location, person, and any other info.

For me, the eco-benefits from digital are great too. Far less chemical processing, reusable data capture, selective printing, and I posit that there is overall less waste generation in manufacture and use over conventional.

And besides, if you were planning to make your long term backups to DVD etc. I would really hope you would make more than the one backup.

Archival-quality CD/DVD blanks probably aren't available at your local office supply chain store, but they do exist. Even so, it's the obsolescence that's more troubling -- sure, you can find an 8" floppy drive if you really look, but do you have a computer that would both know what to do with it and be able to move the data to some other media (or connect to a LAN)? What's going to replace today's CDs and DVDs by 2050?

Perhaps the best thing to do is to get accounts on several media archive/sharing sites and stash copies on all of them, as well as keeping copies on DVD. If you're really concerned about making sure your text and photos will be around, print copies on acid-free paper and put them somewhere safe (worst-case, your great-great grandkids can rescan them).

Video is going to be a bit harder to archive, long-term: properly-stored tapes or archival DVDs will likely outlast the mechanisms that can read them; digital video needs a lot of hard drive space and bandwidth to transfer to archive sites, even by today's standards. I suspect that "digital historian" will be a high-skill profession by 2050, requiring plenty of engineering knowledge to rebuild, maintain, and connect old drive mechanisms, as well as working past the inevitable dropouts and other forms of bit-rot.

As it is right now, one can store a reasonable amount of "uncompressed" (as in miniDV) digital video on a dual-layer DVD-r. With the new blue-laser stuff, one can put multiple tapes on one disc! Even though I find that amazing, I also realize that with HD, comes even larger storage requirements, but I think storage technology is keeping up rather well these days.