Hi all, I don't know if others subscribe to Dead Fred's Relatively Speaking newsletter, but there are often some very interesting tips. Without comment, I post a couple below... accept them or not as you will. Chris http://www.deadfred.com/newsletter_05.php?volume=7&issue=5#6 3. The shortest pencil is better than the longest memory. They say a photograph is worth a thousand words, but look in your own family photo collection and you'll find plenty of photographs with little to say. (more on site) 4. Digital is more fragile than you think. Magnetic media (floppy disks and digital tape) begin to fail in 5 to 10 years. The most generous estimates give them about 30 years. Optically etched media (burned with a laser like a cd-rom or dvd), begin to degrade within 5 to 15 years. And that's not counting scratches. In the word of digital, there is no equivalent of shoving your photos in a shoebox and stashing them in a closet. No, sir. If you want to bring your digital photos with you into the future, you will have to migrate them to new storage devices every 3-5 years. You'll also have to save them in the newest version of the software that turns the 1's and 0's into your vacation snapshots. Quick solution? Scan your prints and print your digitals. Print out any image that you can't stand to lose. Upload it to your favorite photo processing store. Make lots of copies of your favorite digitals and spread them around. 5. Rescue your photos from the Chemical Sandwich of Doom. Those sticky magnetic photo albums that used to be so popular are just about the worst place you can put a photograph. Acidic cardboard covered in stripes of acidic glue on the back, smothered in a vinyl sheet that is so chemically volatile it stinks. Oy. Fortunately, this is one of the few hands-on conservation projects that's easy enough for non-experts to tackle successfully. The key ingredient is a microspatula, which you can find in various archival catalogs and dental supply stores. (more on site)

G'day Chris, All that you have presented is all too true. And the same goes for publishing your genealogical finds. Putting them on the 'Net in a Web Site will only last as long as someone is prepared to pay for and maintain the site. That of course assumes that the location of the Web Site does not crash and lose all your good work, in the meantime. Put it on CD, or even DVD, these days, and it is only good as long as there are machines that can read those disks. And that is changing almost as often as we change our underwear. But they are still reading books that are over 1000 years old. So put everything that you want to keep for any length of time, onto the good old paper - acid free, of course. When I was working, I was given the job of advising another Government Department (I was a public servant) on what they should do with a set of tapes with seismic information on them, that is was estimated would cost them $64 million dollars to do the work to replace the information, if it was lost. They were losing machines that could read some of the tapes, in Australia, and had to send them off to England to retrieve the information. My solution was to transfer the information to tapes that were of a more recent vintage from more modern computers, at a cost of about $400,000. They rejected that option and I have no idea what they finished up doing with those tapes. As that was about 20 years ago, I have little doubt that the information has been lost, by now. But it is a good example of making sure that your valuable information is stored on the most durable medium possible. Keep well and happy, as I am. Happy Hunting ;-) Rfer & Hue Chris Goopy wrote: >Hi all, > >I don't know if others subscribe to Dead Fred's Relatively Speaking >newsletter, but there are often some very interesting tips. > >Without comment, I post a couple below... accept them or not as you will. > >Chris > > >http://www.deadfred.com/newsletter_05.php?volume=7&issue=5#6 > >3. The shortest pencil is better than the longest memory. >They say a photograph is worth a thousand words, but look in your own >family photo collection and you'll find plenty of photographs with > > <snip>