Formats aren’t forever: what will happen to your disc collection?

I recently bought a laptop without a DVD drive and wanted to load some old but expensive software that is on DVD. I know I have a USB-DVD drive somewhere because I bought it when my computers only had CD-drives. When I remembered I could use the DVD drive on an older Mac to access files on the old one, I gave up looking. It was not fast via Wi-Fi but it worked.

My searches for the DVD drive had been unsuccessful but I unearthed a Zipdrive and a DVD-RAM drive, with lots of disks for both. When I have nothing better to do I will fire up these drives if my first laptop still works. It’s the only one that has the requisite SCSI connector. I might find something interesting. I don’t think I will bother with the USB-floppy disk drive because I have thrown out most of the floppies. I might as well check what’s on the large external hard drives that have the capacity of a modest flash drive.

I still listen to my records and occasionally to tapes, despite being a fairly early adopter of CDs. There is something satisfying about these old physical formats that music files and streaming does not match for reasons I don’t quite understand.

I will have a purge of the old computer hardware soon but I’m keeping the turntable and tape deck for a bit longer.

I think we have to make the distinction between formats like Mp3 and jpg. which almost certainly will be playable in a hundred years times and physical formats like vinyl, CD, tape and DVD’s.

DVD’s are slightly hampered both by the format region restrictions and not being totally ubiquitous as MP3’s and jpgs. Fortunately there are ways around these things I am told.

One thing I am keen on is the archival quality of DVD size disks which which will last hundred plus years which is something commercial disks, hard drives and tapes cannot do. If there is a widescale adoption of M-Disk and similar than the ability and likelihood of having hardware and software to read them is highly likely many decades into the future..

I find it interesting how our attitudes have changed in the digital age. In the 70s/80s, if we broke an LP, we wouldn’t even think about taking it back to the record shop and arguing we should be entitled to a free replacement because we had already paid for the content.

On the topic of formats going extinct, it is sad that a very large proportion of scientific footage – video and data – taken during the moon landings is kept on tape, but has never and will never be examined because we no longer have any equipment capable of playing those tapes.

For today’s formats, I agree that the popular, non-proprietary ones such as JPG and MP3 will live on (despite the patents on MP3). I am slightly worried that Microsoft may in future make the WMA and WMV formats obsolete. Microsoft have done it before: I have many MDI (Microsoft Document Imaging) files created with previous versions of Windows, which Microsoft no longer support and you have to go through hoops to get software that can read them. I’m not just having a go at Microsoft, as I think Apple can be just as bad. Yet, I still tend to prefer ripping my CDs to WMA format rather than MP3 as the compression is supposedly slightly higher quality. I hope I will still be able to use these files in 10-20 years’ time, but haven’t got complete confidence.

My view is that with all dat becoming digital then memories of your life, your favourite tunes , pictures, texts and memories will no longer exist in paper form at all. So all the paper data that curently families have access to about prior generations will not exist.

If I were to be buried why not have an M-disk to accompany me? When they dig up the grave hundreds of years hence it may be interesting.

Why not provide copies to members of the family. In theory I know this could all be in the cloud. However unless someone is guaranteed free access and the cloud never fails or is attacked and corrupted I am unhappy that it is superior to physical data.

I realise that jpeg and mp3 are not the best quality but it is a pragmatic view as to what formats might still be relatively common decades hence. There is absolutely no reason why you should not save the same photo in RAW and jpeg. Ditto music files – I have wav., ogg. and mp3. I do also have some wma. and aac. however proprietary systems should be avoided.

Microsoft have a record of formats that are not now easily useable and Apple will be exactly the same given another decade in trying to tie people into their formats.

For me, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays are all I need and, while my equipment plays them I see no need to digitise. I have ripped about ten days worth of music for use in the car but still use the same CDs in the house. I am lucky enough to have accumulated most of the media I want over the last thirty plus years of disc production and despite dire warnings of degradation I can still play all of them. They are going to last me until I no longer need them. Someone starting out, will probably not buy a disc of any type, that’s as it should be since technology has moved on. There are enough of us out there buying CDs to encourage producers to supply them, so the medium isn’t dead yet and when manufacturers stop making players, there will still be convertors to read discs. You sit on your cloud and I’ll spin my disc. Now, who is going to replace the loudspeaker which has been with us for over a century?

Hunting for something the other day in the spare room I came across a whole box full of VHS cassettes including dozens of watched and unwatched films, TV programmes and numerous blank tapes. These had obviously survived a house move two and a half years ago when they were probably put in the ‘deal with them later’ category. Perhaps the VHS player is also lurking in an unopened box in the spare room but I don’t think we’ll want to set it up again. At the moment I think the outlook is that they are going in the bin unless any of the charity shops want them.

“…the archival quality of DVD size disks which which will last hundred plus years…”

When I converted to digital photography in 1998 I stored all my files on CD’s. These, I was informed, would last for up to a 100 years. 10 years later, having upgraded to a larger computer hard-drive in the meantime, I decided one day to transfer all the early original files (two years worth) to my swish new hard drive. Only one-third of them were still readable. I lost most of my early photos. They were stored on everything from El Cheapo CD’s bought in packs of 100 to some extremely expensive gold disks. The failure rate was the same on all kinds. Some of the El Cheapos are still readable. So please don’t talk to me about the longevity of CDs. I no longer trust any kind of CD/DVD storage. Sadly, hard-drives aren’t that much better. Over the years three have died on me. Fortunately, two of them gave me notice. These days I use a belt-and-two-sets-of-braces approach, which involves multiple hard drives as well as Cloud storage ( which I don’t really trust, either).
I won’t go into what happened to many of my old-fashioned negatives and prints in a flood…
There was a salutary story about an American photographer who made the definitive archival collection of his best photos, then stored them and the original negatives in a temperature-controlled bank vault deep in the basement of a bank – in the Twin Towers… There is no such thing as safe storage – but CDs are one of the worst.