On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:46:49 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Be careful not to photograph it.

Who knows whether next years Windows 7.3 will be able to read a JPEG?

That's OK, I think I have enough spares and service information to keep a
BBC micro + drive going for the rest of my lifetime, although I should
really get the JPEG specs off the fileserver and onto a couple of
floppies[1] just to be on the safe side.

[1] actually, I should burn one copy into ROM just so I'm not relying on
a single type of media.

;-)

Serious note: JPEG might be a crappy format for long-term data storage;
I'm not sure[2] how well it recovers from partial errors. Something more
'raw' is probably better for longevity as at least it's possible to skip
over partial errors and get something meaningful back out. (This is
something I've not mentioned yet about reading old data - most of the
time it's horribly incomplete, and some formats are better at letting you
get at least *something* back than others)

[2] I wrote a decoder once, so probably knew, but that was over a decade
ago now and that part of my head's been re-used for something else by now

'course I could post all my JPEGs as ASCII dumps to uk.d-i-y and just let
Google's archive store them for all eternity, but that relies on Google's
archive not being ****.

cheers

Jules