I’ve been working on archiving media for my family, photos that I save as jpegs and films, haven’t gotten will get there.
This got me thinking about the risk of file types getting extinct and unreadable – how should one approach that if the goal is (as long term as possible) archival of data?
I suppose film formats are more vulnerable since algorithms are more complex – but it also feel to me like the common formats are so widly spread that there will always be a way. What are your thoughts?
Don’t just store. Distribute to relatives and migrate to other types of media and formats. Do a new “release” at least every 5 years. And upgrade to modern storage as you do. Use the old storage as cold storage.