Creating lasting memories in a digital world. Share your technical advice

[rumborak]

So, I have a tiny obsession trying to filter, edit and save pictures and videos that I took over the years. What's interesting, in my opinion, is that while my parents have a wealth of really cool and ancient photos dating back almost to the turn of the century, I think our generation will become the least documented, because all the photos/videos will simply bit-rot away.

So, my scheme has been so far to have an external hard drive collect everything, but also have an identical image on Amazon S3.
What do you guys do?

And a direct technical question also: While I am perfectly fine with using JPEG as the picture format, DIVX has been so far what I have transcoded my videos to. However, DIVX is a proprietary format by a company I feel is bound to die sooner or later. Their product is shit, they are descending into a Winamp-like "here's another update nobody cares about but isn't backward-compatible". I have looked into WEBM (Google-backed open compression format), but it's not there yet. It's not meant for big videos at all. Is XVid the way to go?

[SystematicThought]

Hmm, you made a really good point there that has me thinking.

Apart from the pictures in the media, most pictures are stored in tiny files on computers. Some aren't bothered to transfer pictures over from computer to computer so some memories get lost. It's interesting and scary.

Sorry, I don't have any help here. I was was just overtaken by what you said

[theseoafs]

Some aren't bothered to transfer pictures over from computer to computer so some memories get lost.

More than that, even if you do transfer your files every time you get a new computer, hard drives don't live forever, and they sometimes die quite unexpectedly.

I don't know, I haven't given this question much thought.  I've never been one to care about documenting memories through photographs.  Cloud storage is probably the way to go if this is a grave concern for anyone, though.

[rumborak]

Bit-rot is one thing, what about format rot? If you had some important document from the late 80s chances are the software to parse it doesn't exist anymore.

[Fluffy Lothario]

I can say that all my digital photos are on my computer, on my iPod Classic, and on another separate hard drive. Even if two of those three things died or got knocked out, there'd still be the last. I try to update them every few months.

I do have plans at some point to print a ton of photos, maybe spend some hundreds on it, so I have hard copies of them too. You can't do them all though.

[Chino]

I have a secret Cave that I paint in/use as a time capsule. Whenever an electronic device it no longer technologically current, I stash it in there. 

[BlobVanDam]

For videos, mp4 x264 would probably be the way to go at this point. You'll get the best file size / quality, and the format is becoming pretty standardized.

I don't have a lot of photos to back up, but I just have my local PC copy + external. If my house is ever hit by a tsunami or EMP, I'd be screwed though.

[cramx3]

I keep all my media and documents stored locally on my PC's RAID 1 2TB drives. What RAID 1 means is I have two hard drives that are identical in case one fails. I have another pair of 2TB RAID 1 drives as well but haven't used it but I have it cause my first set is almost full. Currently it has another copy of my media just so it has something on it. I dislike the idea of storing my data on the cloud.

[rumborak]

I thought mirroring is Raid 0?

[cramx3]

I thought mirroring is Raid 0?

Raid 0 is a striped set for performance. I have that on two solid state drives for Windows.

[rumborak]

For videos, mp4 x264 would probably be the way to go at this point. You'll get the best file size / quality, and the format is becoming pretty standardized.

Well, that standard is all good, but it's also very proprietary. What I'm shooting for is a format that is open-source and yet reasonably standardized. I have settled now on XVid and am now in the process of recoding all my existing videos (most of which are in DivX) to XVid.

[BlobVanDam]

For videos, mp4 x264 would probably be the way to go at this point. You'll get the best file size / quality, and the format is becoming pretty standardized.

Well, that standard is all good, but it's also very proprietary. What I'm shooting for is a format that is open-source and yet reasonably standardized. I have settled now on XVid and am now in the process of recoding all my existing videos (most of which are in DivX) to XVid.

x264 is an open source h.264 encoder (and it's better than h.264), and h.264/mp4 is basically the standard for new devices. And there are a lot of free programs that encode to x264/mp4.
Of course there's nothing wrong with xVid, but in terms of compression ratio vs quality, it's starting to show its age.

[rumborak]

Oh, shoot!

Not gonna re-encode them again, took me ages yesterday to get all the scripts debugged and whatnot.