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Question from Stella: I have thousands of family pictures that I’ve copied onto an external hard drive, which I keep locked up in a fireproof lock box.
My question is will those pictures last forever or is their lifetime limited in any way?
What I need to know is will my children and grandchildren be able to access those files 10 or 20 years from now, or even farther into the future?
And if they won’t, what do I need to do to guarantee those pictures will last forever?
Rick’s answer: I’m glad you’re taking the time to preserve your precious family photos for future generations, Stella. I’m sure they’ll become treasured keepsakes by your descendants.
To answer your question, I’m afraid the answer would have to be no.
Hard drives store data magnetically on specially-coated metal platters, and there are several potential issues that could arise to prevent people from accessing the files stored on a hard drive in the future.
I believe your best course of action would be to make several copies of those photos on additional external hard drives and/or USB flash drives and distribute them right now to other members of your family.
For example, you could give a copy to each of your siblings as well as each of your children and grandchildren. You can even give copies to your nieces, nephews and cousins if you wish.
The reason I say this is simple: The more copies of those photos that exist in different places, the less chance there is of a catastrophe wiping out all of the existing copies.
If you were to trust that one hard drive the photos are currently stored on to preserve them for all time, they would all be wiped out if the drive were to get lost or stop working. And what if someone were to break into your home and steal the lock box and its contents?
Having multiple copies in multiple locations would ensure that someone in your family would almost certainly have those photos available on a working drive at most any point in the future.
Just be sure to let everyone know that every few years they’ll need to copy those photos onto new drives because the data stored on any type of storage medium will either degrade over time or become unusable due to changes in technology.
Yes, that’s right – technology changes over time. (Remember magnetic tapes and floppy disks?)
Bottom line: To fully protect your precious family pictures from loss in the future, make as many copies of them as you can and distribute them as widely within your family as is practical.