I went out to dinner with a friend of mine whose specialty is JPG compression, storage and retrieval, and he terrified me with stories of massive data loss.
Which is why I'm so excited about Apple's Time Capsule. The ability to be constantly backing up my data via Wifi is a brilliant idea. Taken with offsite storage (I use Apple's .Mac iDisk, but there are plenty of good options), and a Lacie external drive...I think my thousands of scanned Sheldon toons are finally getting the redundancy I should've had a long time ago. So hopefully they'll last a little longer than 5 to 10 years.
...But Abraham Lincoln's hand-written letters will still outlast all of them.
And maybe that's OK.
But you have to remember that your original artwork is being archived in homes around the world and that you used 'acid-free Bristol Vellum cardstock using archival Faber-Castell Pitt and Pigma Micron pens'
That should last longer than Lincolns letters, which after all aren't really as important ;)
Archeologist in the future: (Holding up a pristine but ancient drawing of a duck.) Here we have an excellent example of an icon from the temple of Arthur. We found lots of these types of drawing in peoples houses. Clearly it was some sort of shrine to a cartoon duck. Which was preceded by real engineered ducks by decades.
It's such a shame they went to war againt the cult of Dogbert in 2030 in San Diego, California.
I read a proposal somewhere in the blogosphere recently that data should have a use-by date.
It was thinking more of personal info, but its an interesting concept.
I don't have a link, of course :(
