Preserving digital photos for the long haul

Intel researcher Sean Rhea credits his mom for Foundation, a program he's developing to make sure you can access digital photos and other documents 20 years down the line.

For his mom's 50th birthday, his dad digitized recordings and family movies, as a way to preserve memories. At her 60th, they discovered that some of the files couldn't be opened. The data was on the computer, but it couldn't be interpreted by their current PC.

It's an ironic situation. Analog prints degrade over time. Digital photos, which are supposed to be superior, can degrade instantly through incompatibility, he notes.

Foundation, which is in the experimental stage, tries to ameliorate that. It takes an image of your PC desktop every night and stores any changes. Thus, the software, plug-ins, applications and data you used one year are archived into a storage vault. When you want to look at an ancient PowerPoint presentation, your current desktop opens up the old data and applications through a series of virtual machines.

"The trick is to get it to jump across different operating systems and processors," he said. Ideally, it would be a self-service sort of application: consumers could buy their own disks, or storage space at an ISP.

A number of companies are working on similar systems.