Guides

The short answer: do not play anything, do not clean anything, and do not throw anything away. Take the box out of the loft, the storeroom or the balcony and…

The short answer: you can identify almost any home video cassette without a player, using size alone. A cassette roughly the size of a thick paperback is VHS or Betamax;…

The short answer: Do not put them in a player. That is the first rule and the most important one. A box of tapes that waited twenty years in the…

The short answer: An old projector is the most dangerous machine your family film will ever meet. A projector pulls film using teeth that engage the perforation holes along its…

Short answer: store tapes and film where you yourself are comfortable living — inside the conditioned part of the home, in a closet against an interior wall, on a shelf…

Short answer: A tape that got wet is not automatically a lost tape, but the first hours decide the outcome. Three things save it: get the cassettes out of the…

The short answer: Yes, both photos and slides fade — but they run on two different clocks. A Kodachrome slide sitting in a dry, dark, cool box can hold its…

The short answer: Yes — torn, snapped or badly spliced 8mm film can almost always be repaired and scanned. The tear itself is the small, solvable part of the problem:…

The short answer: No — "I never touched it" is not preservation. The practical service life of consumer magnetic media is 10–30 years, and preservation research points to a 10%–20%…

The short answer: Snow and blur almost always combine two causes: the tape's natural aging and the condition of the machine playing it. The Library of Congress puts the practical…