This is something of a blow to us lazy types who, once something is done, consider it done and dusted, out of sight out of mind, saved for posterity. But no, it is not. It's quite likely to disappear in quite a short time leaving you with a support supporting nothing, a void where once a recorded you cavorted about, drink in hand, friends to hand grinning and laughing and evidence of fun in every pixel.
What to do? Well, the answer, until someone comes up with a solution to the problem, is to regularly save your photos onto a new support. Can you imagine the hassle? I have difficulty backing up my ordinary files. I'm supposed to have bought an external hard drive and a new USB key, but keep forgetting/putting off the purchase. Imagine having to buy a new support every 4 years or so and then saving ALL your ever-increasing photos onto the new disk.
Would you remember? Would you stagger the backup so that every year you back up the last four year's worth of piccies? Imagine the organisation needed. I'm a tad chaotic and I can see I'm never in a million years going to be able to save my digital photos until I'm dead and beyond. Unless some bright spark comes up with a new invention - burning onto a glass structure or something.
I did a wee bit of research for you to see if anyone had an upcoming new technology to save the day. I found a few interesting sites on the subject of the issues surrounding photo storage. Here is one on 10 ways to save your photos, from a gadget website which advises you to save your photos to a new support on a regular basis. Yawn. Here's another on why digital photos distintegrate in the first place. The website savemymemories.org gives some good tips on how to store your photos. They all tend to avoid trusting third party websites which offer online storage because you never know if they'll go bust.
It's all a bit of a blow, isn't it? Just when you thought that digital photos were all easy, labour-saving, and there forever, suddenly it takes effort to keep your memories digitally uncorrupted. At some point soon I should really get that external hard drive. Anyway, I can't say I wasn't warned. Roight?