Speaking of degradation... One of the reasons I brought up the question of how you store your digital images is related to that. Just as film degrades, so does digital media. If we store it on a conventional harddrive..the harddrive data corrupts, the drive fails. If we store it the cloud, thats just using someone elses harddrives. Storing it on DVDs is a good option but they also use organic components.
Heres an interesting article..
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4.html
according to it...
In theory some DVD storage could degrade faster than film.... a 20-100 year window is pretty bad, its basically saying "we don't know".. and that independent labs tests of DVD -R at 30 years under ideal conditions is a potential problem to say the least.
another interesting article
I store my images now on external US B harddrives and for redundancy ,I burn my pics into DVDs, and store in archival binders that are black and zip shut to cut down on the UV effects. I think theres a bit of short sightedness on the part of the Digital camera industry as to long term storage options and needs to be more consideration and research done on data decay in storage.
al