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."
You either didn't read or didn't understand the story.
100 years? No. Not even close. 5-10 years in most cases.
Even in cases where the physical media remains intact and readable, it can be a challenge to find software that reads old file formats. Also the software that reads many old files will not function on newer operating systems. Many old Windows 3.1 programs will not function in XP, generating errors on load up.
So pick your poison. Keep old machines handy to read old files, and those machines *might* boot up for you later when you decide you need these old files. Or cross your fingers and hope the OS of tomorrow will care to play nice with your data - if your CD is still good, which is a long shot.
I wouldn't count on it.
Here's a depressing little snippet:
The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn't be read anymore:
Roughly translated from Dutch:
The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers.
Kodac's revenge?
> Different type of CD. Back then they were analog.
CDs have never been analog. The underlying data structure
introduced in 1984 is digital.
Wut yoo sed.
Ooops, it's Kodak, right?
The other possibility is printing the images on paper in digital form. I recall a technique that would store digital data on paper that looked as if someone sprayed ink randomly at it.
Then of course, there is always antique "silver" film...
Personally yes, Apple IIc.
Workwise, no.
About 7 years ago, I migrated some 300 3.5" floppies to CD-Rs. It gave me a chance to weed out and decide what I wanted to keep.
Last year I bought a DVD-R. I have some 20 CD-Rs, mostly old software versions. I think about migrating to DVD-R and tossing, but some of the old programs are still usable. I have a laptop that runs Win95 and know people still running Win98. So, I'll wait awhile before dumping the older programs.
It was definately a selling point for me.
How expensive is it and where is it offered?
Easy. Depending upon the setup you have, there are several ways.
1. Copy floppy from old to new. You most likely have a Single-Side (SS) Single-Density, or Double Density (DD) Floppy Disc Drive (FDD). SS-SD is 180kb, SS-DD is 360kb DD-SD is 720kb and DD-HD is 1.2MB (all but DD-HD are correct or close, could be 3.5" ;) .) You need to buy a 5 1/4" (5.25") FDD off of eBay (or perhaps the local PC repair shop.) I don't recall if the interface is different, it's been a few years, but I think that a current ATX Legacy FDD controller/interface/cable will work with the old/new system -- YMMV.
2. The method I'd use. You need to use Hyperterm on your Windows PC and a terminal app on the ancient PC; connect them with a null modem cable and to a Xmodem/YmodemG or similar transfer protocol. Check the Hyperterm help files or Google a bit as I don't have time to give a null terminal HOW-TO. Of course, the hard part may be finding an old enough terminal app to use. If the old PC has a modem attached (and appropriate software) you are probably set.
You can hook up a modem or even just a serial link and transfer files.
Or, just take the disk drive out, put it in your "regular computer" and copy the files to your "regular" hard disk.
I can make a print from the negative of a picture my parents took in the 50's. If I had a negative from 1900 or before, I could make a print of it as well. Good luck to those trying to make prints off of a floppy or CD in 2004.
I'm in the process of "going digital", but I will make semi-archival prints of everything I think is worth saving.
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.
Rotate in new CD replacements every several years.
Always convert to the latest format.
Why not?? Paper photographs have lasted 100 years. Tintypes have lasted 100 years. Cave paintings have lasted 1000+ years.
bump
I make prints off of CDs all the time... am I missing something here? Did you mean to say 2104?
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