I have some five images that were fine when I scanned (Epson V850 / SilverFast 8) them and processed in LR about eight years ago but on recent viewing are corrupted - see below.
The mono shot was fine when I posted to Flickr some years ago.
I no longer have the negs so rescanning is out which is not important for these pictures but I’m worried if in the future other scans suffer the same fate.
My masters are stored on an external SSD and backup copies to NAS and Cloud.
The backups are also corrupted.
Any help to pinpoint why the images seem to have self destructed over time would be appreciated.
Thanks for explaining, pity really of course. Is it right to presume that your backup regime has somehow backed up the corrupted files over the top of previous backups?
I’m afraid that I’ve never seen anything like this, or at least not in a corrupted file. It’s a bit similar to what can happen with a very troubled scanner but of course that is not relevant here.
The internet tells me that it can sometimes be an issue with corrupted headers, the examples shown here don’t look like yours but there may be some relevance:
Harry Many thanks for your input on this. The LRQ link was interesting, what I took away is that the issue seems to be with tiffs. Not sure if I’m wasting my time but for the 700 or so tiff files for which I have no negative I’ve made a jpeg copy.
Deducing possible causes from everything you show and relate here, it seems to me “kind of” unambiguous that the photos became corrupted during the process of storing them. There “appears to be” something wrong with how the files are being “read” into the storage device, which would point to a problem with hardware, software or the manner in which you stored them. So before you do any more of those I would recommend a thorough “process by elimination” of finding out what’s going on in your computer set-up and saving procedure/settings that could possibly be causing this. As I’ve never experienced this issue, I can’t surmise what exactly went wrong. This is just to suggest where it would make sense to look based on what is discovered and reported to date. If you are on MacOS, and you are not doing so, you may wish to consider using Carbon Copy Cloner for managing the storage of all your files onto external drives. It’s very reliable and can detect certain kinds of issues in the process of copying or moving files from one place to another.
Let me just suggest a wild guess. It looks like the application that saved tiff file mangled tiff format. Theoriticaly tiff format is not really complicated. It may worth the effort to try to use some utility to carefully examine the headers and see if headers are correct. It may be something with image size with image width be a some number not properly rounded to the some sort of boundary tiff format is expected to follow. Ideally the software version which was used at the time to write file needs to be unearthed.
I wish I could provide a positive answer, but I have had experience with a removeable drive that recorded .jpg images identical in appearance to your "American Football " image . It was the drive itself ,in my instance a usb 2.0 drive. I use usb 3.0 hard disks and SSDs now. Solid state drives have a limited number of writes that casual use wouldn’t cause an issue - but writing changes to images on a regular schedule may require a premium drive. I save two backups - and occasionally reformat the drive and copy over my updated original . I can always be mistaken , but I don’t believe it’s a LR software issue. Best of luck !
My gut reaction is that as the back ups are also corrupted this is possibly an issue from 5/6 years ago when I changed Macs and my storage / back up workflow. I also reorganised my folder system and renamed quite a number of images. Luckily only 5 of around 8000 tiffs affected but I will continue to review them periodically.
In order to make sure that files stay intact, companies update their archives every few years by migrating the whole lot to new hardware. To prevent errors while copying, checksums are compared before and after the migration. The whole process can take a long time (depending on the amount of files) and is fairly complicated too.
For home use, backing up to two storage units and automated folder compares could be all it takes. And it might be a good idea to keep technical complexity low, using USB drives and a 3-2-1 backup strategy.
I’d not consider NAS and Cloud as media for backups of files I care about.
