New SanDisk SD cards are said to retain their data for as long as 100 years; and once recorded, the files cannot be altered or deleted.
One of the side effects of Photoshop on photography is that digital images lack the necessary guaranteed original document status for professional uses such as police investigations and court testimony. Film negatives carry much more weight as proof than does a digital image file. Film is rapidly becoming obsolete, driving demand for a solution suitable for today's digital devices. But conventional rewritable memory cards do not meet legal requirements to prevent data tampering.
SanDisk are launching their SD WORM Card, a Write Once Read Many (WORM) digital memory card to fill this gap. A digital image recorded on a SanDisk SD WORM cards is effectively locked as soon as it is recorded; there is no physical way to alter or delete individual recorded files. Yet viewing the data is simple, as the cards are readable in any standard SD slot attached to a computer or other SD-compatible device.
"As digital media volume has grown and surpassed traditional analog media such as film and audio cassettes in the consumer market, law enforcement agencies and other professionals are facing rising costs and lack of supply," said Christopher Moore, director of product marketing for OEM memory cards at SanDisk. "SanDisk's new SD WORM cards offer professionals a one-stop solution for capturing and archiving critical data, along with many other benefits of moving from analog to digital."
SanDisk say the cards will safely store data for at least 100-years based on reliability data from internal accelerated lifespan testing for cards stored at normal room temperature, with humidity and static protection.
This still does not address the question of the usefulness of ordinary digital images. Most photographers will still use rewritable SD cards, making digital images of an unexpected event still less authoritative than film or WORM images.
