The Future of Media Preservation and How Digital Storage is Evolving
Humans are obsessed with preservation. It’s probably an evolutionary bias since we evolved in an environment of scarcity and never-ending competition for food. However, this mindset is something we rarely think about today when most people in the world have easy access to daily necessities. In truth, the preservation mindset has seeped into every other aspect of our lives — including our memories. We’ve been obsessed with preserving our memories, community histories, and creative ideas for thousands of years. From the age of cavemen to today, we’ve had different techniques for preserving our thoughts and the things we create. However, the biggest leap forward in this area happened fairly recently — with digital storage. Let’s explore the ways digital storage has evolved and how it shapes the future of media preservation!
Early Cameras — The Seeds of Digitization
People underestimate just how much cameras impacted the future of media preservation. This was true even before digitization and digital cameras. Before the appearance of cameras, the “media” people preserved was mostly in the form of books and paintings.
Cameras would change that by giving us the first method we ever had of accurately capturing memories. For the first time, you could show your kids an event that happened decades before their birth — with 100% precision.
As cameras evolved, the precision with which they could capture reality improved as well. Plus, images became more and more durable — especially with the invention of film.
However, the true paradigm shift would only arrive in 1975, when Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented the first digital camera. This moment triggered the all-important shift from analog to digital media. Sure, the first digital photos were stored on a cassette tape, which wasn’t efficient, but it was an important first step.
The moment was crucial for the evolution of digital storage. As you’ll soon realize, the evolution of digital photography and digital storage would go hand-in-hand, with the former pushing the latter onwards constantly.
Rise of Digital Storage Mediums
From that day in 1975, it would take a few decades for digital cameras to enter mainstream. It took engineers years to create models that were easy to use for the average customer — and cheap enough to mass-produce profitably.
However, once digital cameras became popular, it wouldn’t take long for digital storage to evolve. Suddenly, the future of media preservation seemed right on our doorsteps — and we weren’t prepared. Fortunately, the role of technology experts here was to bring us into a new era of storage — and they did.
The lifecycle of digital storage mediums became shorter and shorter with each passing generation. Without digital photography, for example, we may have used floppy discs for storage longer — it wasn’t hard to store plenty of textual data on these.
However, the fact that floppy discs could only hold a couple of pictures forced the medium to evolve. CDs quickly became the norm — but the rise of digital cinematography also gave rise to the DVD. You could rarely store a movie on a single CD within a few years.
As photography moved into compact and increasingly powerful flashcards, other important metrics also improved. It wasn’t just about the size of storage you could use — retrieval speed also became increasingly important. When you need to transfer and manipulate 2000 images in your work as a professional photographer, you can’t afford to wait 5 hours for them to transfer.
Digitizing Old Content
When digital storage became affordable enough, people realized that the future of media preservation was here — and it didn’t just allow them to store imagery created with digital cameras.
With high-quality scanners and converters, preserving historical photographs, audio recordings, and even films in digital format became easier. However, even today, doing this still requires expensive hardware — at least if you want to do it properly.
Fortunately, the demand to preserve analog media in a digital format gave rise to companies specializing in high-quality digitization. With Capture, a front runner in media conversion, media can be transformed into high-quality digital files that remain safe, easily accessible, and ready for future use.
The ability to do this changed the game for media professionals and historical archives, who could suddenly do their jobs more efficiently and securely than ever. And the further evolution of digital storage only increased the possibilities in this regard.
Where Were We In The Early 2000s?
Over the years, the mutually perpetuating cycle looked like this: there was always a steady demand for higher and higher-resolution photos and videos. In the form of digital files, this high-res content took up too much space, leading to the constant advancements in external hard drives, SD cards, and, eventually, cloud storage.
All of these became cheaper and cheaper for the average consumer as well. If you grew up in the 90s, you know how much a 1 GB flash drive would set you back in the early 2000s. These days, we can buy a 64 GB drive for the same price in the same stores.
Of course, it’s important to note that the fast-approaching future of media preservation moved to a digital space for other reasons — it wasn’t just photography. Following suit, music moved into the digital world when the MP3 format became popular. However, music never took up as much space and never pushed the envelope when it came to how digital storage was evolving as much as digital imagery.
Where Are We Today?
These days, the future of media preservation is pretty much here already — at least as far as we can conceive of it right now. However, the next major leap forward was the appearance of cloud storage. Even with SSDs, it became untenable for people to keep terabytes of content at home — at least without risk of failure. Even with the best-made SSD, there was always the risk of mechanical malfunction — and creating backups for huge media libraries was costly and time-consuming.
Cloud storage changed all that by making digital backups as easy as a few clicks. These days, you can buy a few terabytes of space for just a couple of dollars per month on platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox.
What’s The Future?
All things considered, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict the future of media preservation. We can’t predict how far digital storage will evolve once we reach true artificial intelligence. And this is becoming increasingly likely due to the rise of AI development.
Machine learning algorithms, which are heavily used in AI research, already play a key role in optimizing storage solutions. However, only time will tell whether we manage to develop quantum storage and other exciting ideas!
Main kw: future of media preservation
Meta: Discover how digital storage is evolving the future of media preservation. Explore the impact of AI, cloud storage, and digitization.
