Digital Home Thoughts: How To Preserve Photos For 500 Years

"Before he died in 2001, Jacques Lowe decided to store the negatives from his body of work in a bank vault. Among the archives of the notoriously meticulous photographer were some 40,000 images taken of President John F. Kennedy before and during his 1,000-day term in the White House. The storage location Lowe picked was unfortunate: the underground bank vaults of JPMorgan Chase at 5 World Trade Center ... Lukas Rosenthaler, a researcher at the Imaging and Media Lab at Switzerland's University of Basel, has proposed using peer-to-peer file networks on the Internet--the same technology used to circulate pirated music files--as a way of letting photographers of all stripes store their work."

In May 2004, the firm found that 59% of digital camera users make backup copies of their digital photos, but less than half have backups for their backups. According to Lukas, copies of encrypted digital files would be distributed across a shared network of servers around the world, which Rosenthaler calls Distarnet. "The idea is not to give everyone access to the data, but to prevent data loss," he says. Very interesting. Currently all my valuable data is on one machine (with mirrored drives) and with one backup on DVDs but I spend many a sleepless night thinking about the worst case scenario. How do you backup your data?