Today, modern digital technology makes it easy for the average person to take photos and videos. But where is the best place to place this data so that it is not lost? In order not to have to regret the lost memorable videos and photos, you need to know how to properly store them.
Why older media are worse
Film camcorders and VHS video recorders are very short-lived. The readheads on the devices wear out and there is no way to replace them now. Magnetic films tend to be demagnetized; in just 10-15 years, the video may already be completely lost. Even if the device can somehow be preserved for many years, most modern TVs do not have analog outputs - "tulips".
It would seem that DVD and CD media were not so long ago a novelty, and even some models of equipment are still equipped with drives for reading them. But thanks to high-speed internet and cloud technologies, the discs are beginning to be covered with thick layers of dust. It became obvious that very soon the drives would disappear from store shelves, in a few years the ones that people had in stock would break, and later they would be remembered altogether as some kind of gramophones. Therefore, storing information on disks is quite dangerous if you look into the distant future.
The most modern storage media today are phones, smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers. Data is stored here on hard drives, new-fangled solid-state drives, flash drives, microSD, etc. But do not forget that a hard drive can also fail, and this is often what happens. Diligently sorted memorable archives are lost along with breakage. SSDs and flash drives lose data after a year or two if they are not used at all, so they are also not suitable for long-term storage.
How and where to store data
It is imperative to duplicate data in several places. For example, on a laptop and a personal computer. If your money allows, purchase an additional external hard drive, record photos and videos on it, and store it somewhere on a shelf in a safe place. When you notice that technology has begun to become obsolete, rewrite the information to more modern media.
Duplicate information over the Internet to cloud storage. The most popular and reliable services are Yandex. Disk, Cloud @ Mail, Google. Drive, etc. For example, Mail gives each of its users 100 gigabytes of storage space for any data, Yandex is slightly less - 10 gigabytes, expandable to 20, Google - 15 gigabytes. Nothing will happen to the data in cloud storage, but at the same time, each license agreement says that the service can be turned off without further explanation of the reasons. In reality, companies usually care about their users. It is necessary to store the most valuable here and only after having duplicated it.
If you don’t completely trust electronics, print your very best photos and create home photo albums like in the good old days. Trust the printout to some serious office so that the quality is at the level. Testing the quality of a photograph is quite simple - put it on a window in sunny weather and hold it for a day or two. If the colors remain in good condition, then after 40 years they will be normal. If the photo fails the test and is faded, then look for another place to print.
Be sure to convert analog media into digital form, print out undeveloped films, because after a few years hardly anyone will be able to do this. Digitizing films can be done using a tuner, capture card, or in a specialized company. This procedure is not cheap, so if there are too many records, choose the most valuable ones.
