I do not expect pictures and documents to always be JPEGs, GIFs and DOC files. I am in my mid 50’s so I have been through tape (including cassette) floppies (including 2.88), Zip, JAZ, Doublespaced IDE hard drives, SATA hard drives, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RW, all the flavors of DVD,and thumb drives, and I still have all my data. I have documents that were originally created in Wordperfect, and saved to a 5 1/4 floppies, that are now DOCX files stored on a 3 TB drive and the cloud.
I bought a converter to switch my home VHS movies originally to MOV, and now AVI. There will always be converters. All my old music CDs are now M4As, but I still have some ACCs, MP3s. You need not worry about media and file structure as long as you stay current. My grand kids will be viewing my pictures, but they probably won’t be called oldman.jpg
I understand that the social aspect of a place like this, plus the expertise of the staff, has value. I miss the local Comicbook / SF book store we used to have around these parts, too. And yes, I bought stuff there vs. just browsing & then going to Amazon to purchase. But the $100 “membership” thing makes me wonder…
Great if you can swing it, I suppose. But most people can’t afford something like that for a venue so specialized. So I wonder if nice places like this will only be for the relatively financially privileged in the future.
Well, it sounds like you are more prepared than most of us - and, frankly, more than I am
I still say that archival quality prints are key, which you can always supplement with your data archive plans, which will hopefully survive you long enough to be of use.
Didn’t Borders (or is it B&N) have a loyalty card you had to pay for every year to get a discount (meaning you’d actually never get the full percentage discount after deducting the annual cost of the program)? And Amazon has Prime. And Costco has memberships. I don’t consider any of those “elite” - though all of those memberships give discounts, so your “loyalty” to that one vendor will presumably be offset by savings. From a strictly mercenary perspective, one doesn’t get that same benefit from Borderlands, having a smaller inventory, and only one outlet.
This is one of those things where I’m glad to see others have stepped in, but it’s not something I could justify for myself.
As the owners make clear - this is actually a special case. If they were competing with other local businesses, they’d be fine, even with the wage increase (and, in fact, the coffee shop portion of the business is unaffected by the wage hike and is doing fine). But they’re not - they’re competing with Amazon, selling fixed-price items, something they were already struggling to do.
Yeah, if you’re willing to spend time every couple of years changing the formats on all your documents, that works. (Assuming the physical media hasn’t become corrupt, that is, something that can happen quite quickly with digital media.) Me, I’d rather have an archival format where I don’t have to do that.
I was sorting through some of my father’s stuff recently - he had boxes and boxes of papers and photographs, but he also had stacks of some sort of reel-to-reel video tape and five inch floppies. I don’t even have the machines to read them, much less convert them at this point. (And, since I can’t tell what’s on them, I’m not sure the effort to find the equipment would even be worth it.) The photographs from the second world war, on the other hand, are still fine.
And that really is a key point. At least with slides, and to a lesser extent, negatives and movie film, you can figure out the subject matter without having to pay for conversion. But with a black box, you just can’t know whether or not you’ll a get a huge bill for an attempt to rescue unrecoverable data, a boat load of bit rotted internet porn or a treasure trove of wonderful, irreplaceable memories.
As you note, most people really aren’t in a position to constantly convert their data to a current format and media, and even doing so can still result in permanent loss of data. Also, format conversion may loose critical data, or be impossible without drivers that aren’t available, such as for converting RAW format photos and videos. Colors paces, aspect ratios, gamma and other details can get munched badly. And you can get massive formatting losses when converting vector, layout or word pressing files, especially those without embedded fonts. Long term digital archiving is a difficult problem that has not been solved.
Those membership programs are totally worthwhile if you buy enough books. Before ebooks came along and caused our paper book buying to plummet, we gladly paid the $30 or so per year for Chapters’ 10% discount club. But then we were buying over $500 worth of books per year.
Every year you should go ahead and use a book printing service to just print out the best stuff from the year. You can keep backing up but you’ll be guaranteed that the printed version will never run out of batteries or be unable to be read, like those zip disks you still have from only ten years ago.
This. I recently opened up a box in my grandmother’s attic. It was filled with stereoscopic images from a hundred years ago. It just worked with no issues.
Convert the important things to paper, use your digital backups as, well, backups.
No I expect those who want them, to maintain them. It was I, and not my mother who took her wedding photos and scanned them so her great grandchildren can view them. She passed on 10 years ago, but her photos still exist and are owned by all three of her children and by all three of her grandchildren. Which brings up the point of one photo, or one negative can be destroyed easily. They must be handled carefully. My brothers and I can print out my parents wedding photos, and use them for table centerpieces. I recently attended a funeral where they had a monitor set up showing photos from that wonderful person’s life, and some of those photos included pictures of my mother I had never seen before. I asked the relatives for the photos and gave them a thumb drive. My family now has them too. Could this be done with printed photos?
Goodbye bulky, annoying, slow as hell Syquest drives. Hello inexpensive Zip disks. Sneakernet compatible. Mac and PC. Hell, our print jobs were archived on them ( :-o ). And Apple had just dumped 3.5 inch floppies, so mac users were in the market for removable media.
