How to Preserve Old Photos and Home Movies

Some camcorders can connect directly to your computer for easy video capture.

A closet filled with old photographs and home movies may seem secure, but older media formats do not last forever. Decades of storage can cause photos to fade and tapes to degrade. Transferring old media to digital storage devices will preserve them, and backups can ensure you never lose access to your treasured photos and favorite videos.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

1. Scan your old photographs. Any basic scanner device will give you an acceptable level of quality. Increasing the scanner's dots-per-inch or DPI setting will ensure no loss of detail occurs. If you don't have a scanner, most print-on-demand businesses rent scanners for a nominal hourly fee.

2. Capture your home movies to hard disk. The exact method of transfer will depend on the video format. If you have an older VHS camcorder or VCR, you can transfer video tapes using a computer with a TV-tuner card and TV-recording software. Copy DVD videos using ripping software such as Magic DVD Ripper or disk imaging programs such as Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%. If you lack the requisite equipment, photo/video stores usually carry the correct cables and devices to make the transfer or can convert your footage to digital format for a fee.

3. Back up all stored data. Digital copies of your photos and videos will never degrade, but digital media is still vulnerable to accidental deletion, corruption and other damage that could render your data inaccessible. Save your information to at least two storage devices and store them in different physical locations for added protection. Because you may wish to store your converted photos and home movies for much longer than the lifespan of any one computer, you should periodically create additional backups as you retire current devices.

4. Make physical and networked copies as desired. Digitally stored media has the advantage of several different sharing methods that don't degrade the original copies. You can quickly burn photos or videos to disc or share them online using services such as Facebook, YouTube or Picasa.

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• Magic DVD Software: Homepage
• Daemon Tools: Downloads
• Alcohol Soft: Homepage