adding your life to the future

I dont know about you folk out there but...I feel that documenting your life in diaries/photographs/film is so important. something to offer your future family members. in fact I'd say you owe it to them and the affordability of modern technology means theres no excuse not to. Ever since I was given my first Brownie stills camera as a child by my loving parents I have been fascinated by being able to capture a moment of life forever in that little black plastic box. all you had to do was ensure the thing had a roll of film inside and a small click of your finger captured a moment of life in glorious technicolor..isnt that magic!? plus the image you have plucked from that thing called 'Time' which is forever moving forward doesnt ever age or decay. its really magical. To fast forward a little that magic is extended by moving pictures/film and for the past 30 years of my life I have tirelessly endeavored to grab as much 'Time' as possible into my little magic black box. that has included family milestones like birthdays..holidays..Christmas times etc plus those little classic moments of life things which were unplanned and always turn out to be the best clips of film. I have such things as sitting around the table for a family meal. my children growing from a baby..the first walk...feeding time with messy face ha...first day at school with tears..the first little boy/girlfriend holding hands so innocently etc how you not capture such experiences forever? all this leads onto a worrying problem if you value such family treasures that will not only be enjoyed into ones old age when memory fades but also be enjoyed by other family members in the future when you are dead and buried, the problem if fast changing technologies today and future proof archiving of these family treasures...so very important. todays technology relies on the slim shiny plastic digital disc called dvd or blue ray disc. Remember when this disc first emerged it was promised to last a life time? that you could scratch it..spill tea over it...throw it around etc and still it would play. well it turned out to be exaggerated and mostly until. how long is a lifetime anyway? some marketing men proudly stated they would last at least 50 yrs. a few years later this was reduced to at least 20 yrs. since then these claims have been discredited...so whats the truth? can we trust our most valuable memories to these slices of shiny plastic? Many experts now say no you cant. that the digital technology isnt a future proof stable base for long term storage of data. that there are inherent flaws in the burning/recording process. that time ravages slowly deteriorate the inks/dyes used on dvd discs, that temperatures also effect storage etc so in reality we were conned in the beginning by Corporate marketing men..no surprise there then. my family memories are important to me so...I do my best to secure them by....ensuring my recorded discs are stored away from sunlight and every day house dust. that the temperatures even. I have recorded dvds now that are 10 yrs old and recently I have started to play them back. what I have found is that one in every 10 discs after 10 years is starting to fail. this means bits of film have dropped out..or broken up. some freeze the picture..others are rejected half way through playing etc so those of you who do the same as me beware. I am currently copying all my stored discs onto new blank ones via my dvd/blueray player/recorder. easy to achieve as my recorder has a built in hard drive so you just transfer film from old discs up onto the hard drive and re-burn onto new discs. my theory being the newly copied discs should last another 10 yrs. on top of that I am making two copies of everything on different brand discs just in case one type fails down the road. also I am burning two types of blue ray discs again different brands and at different quality settings and burn speed. so in essence I shall end up with 4 copies of each film. bit over the top one may say? but arent these memories important? I am thinking of also archiving my films onto an external hard drive which are reasonably cheap these days on places like Amazon. one issue with external hard drives for archiving long term is to remember that the internal mechanisms inside that drive the hard discs will fail over time if not used so...dont just throw it in the cupboard and forget about it for years no..it needs to be run every few months to keep the cogs oiled up. hard disc drives should not fail like dvds as they are designed to hold material longer. but that doesnt mean they definitely cant fail they can...just less chance of it happening. what about flash drives and memory cards for long term archiving? I have little experience of these. longest I've had film stored on a memory card is 3 years now and it plays very well. can anyone suggest any other ways of secure archiving? I think we owe it to our childrens children and beyond when we are long dead to show them our family moments on film dont you?? CALLEN.....