Passing Clouds

Paternal great-grandparents, Edinburgh 1886
(yes, it appears great granny was a ventriloquist)

I've already had some things to say about the impermanence of photographic media. Given the fragility and limited span of human life itself, fretting about the longevity of one's photographs does seem a little vain, in both senses of the word, to say the least. Viewed sub specie aeternitatis, it's always going to be a hopeless proposition.

After all, this planet is going to be engulfed by the sun when it hits that awkward and moody red dwarf stage, in a mere 7.6 billion years from now. Though, given that it is true that rescuing the family photographs is one of the few things that will cause people to re-enter a burning house, maybe some kind of planetary album will make it onto the fleeing Starship Ultimate Insurance Claim.

However. If you, like me, enjoy thumbing through a stack of inherited family photos, and rejoice at acquiring a new one such as the one above, you may feel a certain obligation to pass on some objective evidence of your appearance and dodgy fashion sense to at least a few more generations. In this respect, digitally-originated images are a problem. On four levels:

1. Digital media are inherently unstable. Even the CDs and DVDs you have dutifully burned (you have burned DVDs of your files, haven't you?) are prone to fading if badly stored. No, really. And just forget about magnetic media like hard drives.

2. File formats become obsolete. Though it's likely standard JPEG and TIFF files will be readable "for ever" (maybe), the myriad proprietary RAW formats almost certainly won't be.

3. People are lazy, and forget to make backups. See (1).

4. When you die, your descendants will probably heave your precious backup DVDs into a skip, sight unseen. See (3). Would you sort through thousands of digital images, just to rescue the odd interesting shot of grandad's life?

Now, the advent of "The Cloud"* seemed to many to provide an answer to these dilemmas. For a modest sum of money, you could hire large amounts of space somewhere "out there", and dump all your files into the digital equivalent of a rented storage unit. With guarantees of secure, multiple backups, it seemed a perfect solution. I understand many people have gone for it in a big way, especially where file sharing and blogging is part of the deal.

Last week, I read this:

You may not have noticed or you might have already forgotten but on December 15, the website Drop.io quietly ended a two-year run as the web’s most elegant file sharing service. It was a small taste of the cloud to come, the near future when everything will be stored on invisible servers and shared with a link – and not on our terribly physical hard drives or USB keys. Ad-free and clean, the site was exactly what so much of the internet isn’t: a place for our own making, without any distractions, and serving a simple and crucial purpose. Teachers used it to gather homework assignments, designers used it to send files with clients, music lovers used it to share their mixtapes with friends and crushes.

And then, just when we thought our data would live forever, free as a cloud – and our old mp3 mixtapes would always be there to keep us nostalgic – a bigger cloud came along and poof, it was gone. Facebook bought Drop.io and its creator Sam Lessin (who helped Mark Zuckerberg out in early days). And that meant that this simple purpose-driven space for our stuff (what else do we need?) that seemed so secure (even the phrase “Drop.io Drop” contains its own redundancy) had to go away, along with all of the files we put there.

RIP Drop.io: when part of the cloud just floats away / Alex Pasternack

I also read that many people received only a few day's notice that all their files would be deleted; not frozen, or transferred, or briefly inaccessible, but deleted. I believe something similar happened a few years ago at Tumblr, the popular blogging and media sharing host. Hmm, "Put not your trust in princes..."

There is no easy answer to any of this, other than the traditional advice to make multiple backups on different media, the more stable the better, and keep them in separate, safe, archivally-sensible places. That is to say, avoid heat, light, humidity, pests, and sources of magnetism.

But here's a thought: why not print a few copies of the really good ones (using pigment inks if you really want to do a job), and keep them in acid-free albums, mounted with archival photo-corners? Your descendants will be among the very few with family photographs dating from the "digital disaster" era, 1998-2020. Everyone else's will have vanished into thin air.

A cloud, vanishing

* Distributed, web-based computing, with servers providing software and data to clients "on demand".