subject: Memories are forever, DVDs are not [print this page] Memories are forever, DVDs are not Memories are forever, DVDs are not
DVDs and CDs are the cockroaches of the recorded media world. They can survive a nuclear holocaust and continue to provide years of musical and cinematographic enjoyment, to post apocalyptic mutants, for generations to come. We shoot laser beams at them every time we watch or listen to them. If they can resist a laser onslaught, they must certainly be indestructible. Right?
In Japan in 1982 Sony, CBS/Sony, Philips and Polygram announced the development of the worlds first Compact Disk system that utilised a medium that they claimed was "almost permanently durable." Apart from the benefit of their virtual immortality, they also provided a remarkable improvement in audio quality. There were no more of the hisses and pops, that we had become accustomed to when listening to LPs. They weren't without their critics, though. As they were merely a digital approximation of the recorded sound, they didn't possess the ambience and depth of an analogue recording.
However, despite the relative authenticity that LPs provided, nobody could argue with the fact that if you so much as looked at one at the wrong angle, your favourite song would be scratched forever, and be cursed to repeat the one line for all eternity. I hesitate to even mention the other analogue medium, cassette tapes. I can't begin to count the times I've had to salvage what I could of a tape that had been sucked like spaghetti into my boom box. When I was unlucky enough for it to happen in my car, I was just happy to rescue my car stereo from the cassette tape's evil clutches.
So considering what we used to put up with, shouldn't we just count ourselves lucky to have these shiny, holographic, pieces of bling. Well, let's take a moment to look at the bigger picture and another new technology that currently rules supreme. The Digital camera. These amazing little devices have revolutionised the family snapshot. Bad photographers everywhere can check their handiwork and choose whether to keep or delete accordingly. Of course, we seldom do delete, so we end up with a hundred times more photos than we ever did before. We upload them to our home computers and save, email or print them to our hearts content. With the number of mega-pixels and the sizes of the hard-drives we store them on growing exponentially, can these technological marvels even have a down side?
Yes, they can. The problem lies with the reliability of the computers we store them on. Computers aren't intended to last forever, and in this regard, at least, they don't disappoint. Viruses, worms or just hard drive failures can destroy our computers and send our treasured family snapshots spiralling helplessly into the digital netherworld. We can, of course, back them up to external hard drives, but they suffer from the same failings as the internal drives. But, what else can we do to rescue our memories from these ticking time bombs?
Some online companies are offering the ability to upload your photos to their servers for storage over the years. They take the responsibility of ensuring your photographs are backed up and kept safe and sound forever. Well, for as long as you keep paying the annual fees, and the company is still operating.
If that doesn't give you the peace of mind that you are looking for, then there is our last line of defence, which is to backup our photos to CD and DVDs, which can hold hundreds of photos on each disk and keep them safe and sound forever. A perfect solution.
Except, of course, we are forgetting that DVDs aren't the cockroaches they were meant to be. One Dutch computer magazine put recordable disks to the test, and found that many of them deteriorated and suffered from data loss in as little as two years. This included both cheaper brands, and the more expensive ones that you would normally be more inclined to entrust your families memories to. While this may be one of the more pessimistic reports, it does raise the questions as to how safe our photographs really are, and what we can do to ensure that our great grandchildren get a chance to have a photographic record of this period in time, which they may one day refer to as the digital dark-ages.
Perhaps all we can do is make the most out of what we do have, making constant multiple backups, until a better technology arrives. On the other hand, do we really need to have a hundred times more photos than we used to? Do we need to download those ethereal electronic musical ghosts called mp3s? Do we need to fill our shelves with movies, and even entire television series, that we may never get around to watching again anyway?
Perhaps a return to a simpler life could provide the answer to all these problems. If we only allowed ourselves the time to learn to take good photos with a real camera, maybe 24 exposures would be enough. That way we could hide the negatives safely away, where they could wait to be discovered, like a celluloid treasure, by generations to come. If we could listen to our old LP collection, even with those hisses and pops, at least we would know that it was real sound, and not just a plastic facsimile. And finally, we could watch the movies the way they were meant to be watched - on the big screen, where they are a true experience and not a disposable one, and they can be recorded in our memories forever.
