I've been a long fan of digital cameras, and I have an almost autistic obsession with cataloguing the family pics, and backing them up. I still have loads of old non digital pics I need to scan in, but managed to do the most important ones.
So being digital, you have a data copy that will last for ever, and as long you have a back up, then its fool proof right?
Wrong
What I didn't factor in was data corruption. As those hard drives start to get old, and they scatter your data packets across those hard drive platters, you can get data corruption.
I was checking my home server, and was shocked to find some older pics had indeed got corrupted and were unreadable. There was also older pics that had been over written, for no apparent reason, different file names, so looks like problems with the file system.
To compound the issue, the errors and corruption had been replicated over perfectly to my backups
Luckily, as a last resort, I also archive to CD's, but didn't realise that these also degrade!
They reckon CDR (writable CD's) and DVD's can degrade within 5 - 10 years. Commercial CD's (such as your original Madonna CD) have a much longer life.
So as we all embrace the digital revolution, the reality is, it's not as reliable as you may have first thought.
That wedding video of yours will probably last longer on a Video Cassette than it will as a digital copy
The time old method of storing your photo negatives in a shoebox may actually turn out to be a much safer bet than a bunch of degraded CD's found by your kids in 20 years time!
Apparently there are now companies offering Gold Disks which will be supposedly guaranteed for 300 years, but for the average person in the street, if you want treasure your memories, make sure you back up regularly, and if it's on CD/DVD's, then check and reburn them every few years
