Posted on 11/29/2004 8:47:34 AM PST by Dr. Zzyzx
The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures — millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work." Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that the Library of Congress has spent the past several years forming committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for digital preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with "a deluge of digital information," had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digital material so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardware or software being used. The assumption is that machines and software formats in use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.
"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals," said Ken Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives and Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3 1/2-inch diskettes, even the larger 5-inch floppy disks from the 1980s. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CDs and other backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CDs and hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed to extremes in humidity or temperature.
And if a CD is scratched, Hite said, it can become unusable. Unlike, say, faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital file becomes corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.
"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.
Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate materials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trapped in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they are forced to devise their own stop-gap measures, most of them unwieldy, inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.
Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he was in elementary school, Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail since college.
Now Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence. Over the years, Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like CDs and DVDs. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm sentimental about," he said.
Yet Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CDs, especially the rewritable variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a year and a half ago they started to deteriorate and become unreadable," he said.
And of course, migration works only if the data can be found, and with ever more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.
"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed but by being lost," Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"
For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the bin under the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach to archiving, means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.
Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box. The machine contains everything in his life from the day he married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get it to boot up," he said.
Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializes in long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now, the museum approach might be the most feasible answer. "As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable, you'll be able to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient computer available," said Schwartz., whose company has worked with the Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.
"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," Schwartz said. "There's going to be a whole industry of people who will have shops of old machines, like the original Mac Plus." Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is the printout method.
Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been using computers since elementary school. She creates her own Web sites and spends much of her day online.
Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set at her parents' house 100 miles away. "As much as a lot of people think print will be dead because of computers," she said, "I actually think there's something about the tangibility of paper that feels more comforting."
Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes to preserving photographs. If stored properly, conventional color photographs printed from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading. Newer photographic papers can last up to 200 years.
There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a hard drive. Today's formats are likely to become obsolete, and future software "probably will not recognize some aspects of that format," Thibodeau said. "It may still be a picture, but there might be things in it where, for instance, the colors are different." The experts at the National Archives, like those at the Library of Congress, are working to develop uniformity among digital computer files to eliminate dependence on specific hardware or software.
One format that has uniformity, Thibodeau pointed out, is the Web, where it often makes no difference which browser is being used. Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular archiving method, especially when it comes to photos. Shutterfly.com and Ofoto.com have hundreds of millions of photographs on their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup set of each photo sent to the site. The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the fault line," said David Bagshaw, chief executive of Shutterfly.
But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out of business? Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side but offered this bit of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'll always make people's images available to them." Constant mobility can be another issue. Stephen Quinn, who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to keep the amount of paper in his life to a minimum and rarely makes printouts. Quinn has a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an eclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980s, when he started out on an Amstrad computer. All of Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable" he says) and other writings are on those various digital devices, along with his daily diaries.
At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for his children, but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad disks more than 20 years ago. He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer. "I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read it with," Quinn said. That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever solution people might use, it is sure to be temporary. "We will always be playing catch up," said Rutenbeck, who is working at pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives and stacks of old Zip disks. "It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't keep a box of everything I did in first grade."
In case you have not noticed, technology changes.
I would bet the house on the fact that CD's as we know them today will not exist in 100 years.
Even if that was not the case, even CDs can be damaged, and all the data on them lost.
Preserving information is nothing new. It is funny that books printed several hundred years ago are in some cases in better shape then book printed in the last century (has something to do with the acid in the paper).
Important information will be preserved (at a great cost) but for the average individual, many memories that are being faithfully stored on computer hard drives and on CDs will simply fade away.
Again, this is not a new problem, think of Egypt. The records of a whole civilization was lost for thousands of years because no one could "read" the database (hieroglyphs)
They curved their history into stone, and yet it was lost for a very long time. We store our history as magnetic bits, where too much heat, or a strong magnetic field can wipe it all out.
My advise, if you have important information (and photographs) put them on paper. It will have a better chance of surviving the next hundred years.
Carolyn
Yeah, bring the older, more permanent media, like film (early ones ignite spontaneously), paper photo prints (faded, crumbling, flammable), vinyl (scratches, dust, warping), tape (media flakes off, brittleness, wear).
Let's face it: the only way to make sure something is going to last for the ages is to engrave it in clay and then fire the clay.
Or embed it in a fruitcake.
BUMP
I plan to beam all of my important data into the Phantom Zone, where time stands still for all eternity.
I just bought a new 27” TV. It was cheaper than having the old one repaired.
correct. I posted without thinking how old the system in question was.
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Video tape degausses itself in ~7 or 8 years.
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Bull. I played my wedding video a few months ago to transfer it to DVD. The tape was 14 years old. Quality was fine.
I played a video of some time I spent in Japan. That was 20 years ago. The tape played just fine.
I have two japanese movies I purchased back then as well. Both are 20 years old on VHS. The quality is just fine.
Your tapes don't deteriorate because they degauss, they deteriorate from wear and tear as you play them in a tape player.
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I sure would like to be able to retrieve my collage work from my old 5” floppies – done on a Commodore. The trusty Commodore died, and with it the ability to read the disks.
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Buy a Commodore on ebay. Build a cable to allow your PC to connect to your Commodore disk drive (plans are on the internet), run a C64 emulator, and make image files of your disks.
It takes a little work, so you have to decide how badly you want to old files.
In the future we will all have massive storage fruitcakes.
Paint Shop Pro. Next question?
Probably. I've got the full manual with schematics for it though. I've considered taking it to a place around here that repairs archaeic hardware like that and see what they think it would take to fix it up completely. I really just can't stand to let the old thing go into the trash, because it's survived almost 40 years, and like me, deserves more than that. (Zeugma and my Tandberg were made the same year!) :-)
Interesting discussion....
Semper Fi
Not a big deal. As long as the format is documented, somebody will always be able to create a program to read the data. This just means that undocumented formats (e.g. MS Word) are a bad choice for archiving.
Check-out The Soundsmith. They specialize in classic audio equipment, including Tandberg. They even custom-make parts which are no longer available. Earlier this year they re-built my 28 year-old Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4002 turntable. Here's the link:
http://www.sound-smith.com/tandparts.html
Missy Leblanc, where are you?
The great irony of the Information Age: in 100 years, nothing from now will be remembered.
I hear the Texas Air National Guard has some old equipment.
Disks have been growing fast enough that I just copy the _entire_ contents of the old disk into a subdirectory of my new one, when I upgrade. I've owned disks of sizes (in Megabytes, guesstimating) 5, 10, 20, 40, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3000, 6000, 15000, 30000, and 80000. And that 80 Gb drive is looking pretty small compared to what's out there today.
Don't expect to use offline media as archival storage. Keep it all online, and all backed up. When a new backup media comes into vogue, throw out the old ones once you have a few good generations of new backups. Removable IDE drives are currently the most cost effective backup media - lower cost per bit than tapes, and easier to work with.
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