I’ve often toiled over the archivability of digital imagery and even wrote about a close call I had in losing a drive that archived some of my work, A Happy Ending to My Drive Crash. With some regularity I have thoughts revisiting the prospect that it’s just a matter of time before I have to endure this again and deal with the loss of a drive and even worse an irrecoverable loss of a drive. While there are certain precautions you can take to minimize such loss I can’t help but think that digital will always lack permanence.

Proponents of photographic prints are always keen to highlight that paper has been an archivable medium for thousands of years where as digital is a relatively new phenomenon of the last half century. Less electricity digital imagery is locked away on hard drives that then become perfect paper weights. The more I see others immerse themselves in digital photography the more I see society risking the loss of a significant portion of our visual history. Can we really trust digital to always be there? Enter a video short I saw the other day titled “Lost Memories”. It’s worthy of a watch…

LOST MEMORIES (French, English Subtitles) from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo.

So now that you’ve seen the video I ask you…. how permanent do you expect your digital imagery to be and what are you doing about it?