Long-term Archiving for Family Photos & Videos

[John Matthews]

Alright. So here's my goal. I would like to archive 300 edited, high-quality photos (good enough for HQ printing at 8 x 10) and 30 minutes of edited, high-quality 1080p video. I would like this to be put on a 4.7gb M-disc for long-term data storage, but I guess I could go for 25gb Blue-ray M-discs if absolutely necessary. What would you recommend for doing this in terms of codecs?

By my calculations, 300 8-megapixel jpeg's at 100% compression is about 1.3gb. That leaves 3.4gb for the video or 30 minutes of 1080p at 15 mbps in h.264 and in a mp4 wrapper.

Much of the source material is 1080p or 4k and raw for photos.

Given that "preserving the content" would be the priority, does this make any sense to anyone and do you have experience with archiving this way? Just looking for input.

[Curtis Ross]

Im curious to what others have to say on this subject.... I've had some thoughts of archiving some video/photos for viewing by my very young children so they can view when they get older. But my thinking is against putting anything of this nature on DVD or even Blu-Ray...  30-40 years from now who is to say these types of products will be easily accessible. 

[webrunner5]

Well as of now nothing else has a chance to survive nearly as long as a Blu-Ray can. Now will there be a Blu-Ray player to play it, good question. But 30, 40 years is really not that long. Well in reality half a persons life almost but.. I sure would not trust any of these modern day printers to have prints survive that long even though they blow about 100 year inks. Yeah maybe if they never see the light of day! Lucky to last 5 years if the sun is on them. I lived in Florida for years and prints don't last for crap down there. Heat, humidity, and sun not good for print media.  

Trouble is now technology moves so fast God only knows what we will have 5 years from now, let alone 40 years from now. We probably can't begin to imagine.

I would imagine a photo album will last 40 years. They are almost always closed. I would imagine a SD card will last that long. As to a player for it ??? I am sure both will be good for a laugh from your kids 40 years from now! The way fashion goes they might be wearing the same outfits we are wearing now.                                          

[Davey]

I have 350GB of archived material on Google Drive, as well as on three separate external hard drives and some footage that is edited down saved as private videos on YouTube (three of which are already 45yrs old). i guess that if I die before ever putting the footage on discs, then nobody will know how to get it all off the cloud. The wife wouldn't have a clue, though she knows there are thousands of photos and dozens of hours of 1080 and 4k video floating around in the ether.

Perhaps I should do what I was going to suggest - to put all your stuff up on the cloud and leave instructions / passwords in a safe deposit box. Certainly do not rely on any kind of physical storage lasting any great length of time.

[tomekk]

I do big prints of my photos. High end ink printer + fine art archival paper and they will last if you keep them at home in normal conditions. UV light is cut out by windows at home. Having gigabytes of photos is a big no-no for me, though. Quality over quantity.

[no_connection]

Whatever you decide, add a checksum of every file so you can verify if it's intact or not. And make multiple copies so you can find one copy of a file that is not corrupt.

I have used this and like it. http://www.exactfile.com/

Good to have for files on computer too. It's good to know that your source material is still intact later in a project or after transfer.