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."
… brother taped her talking into a tape recorder; try to find a reel-to-reel tape player anymore.
Try to even get one repaired!
And don't forget, if you're going to write on the cds, make sure you use a proper marker for that purpose, not of the usual permanent variety. These are known to eat the outer reflective coating over time, and render the disc useless.
Everything's disposable now -- even TVs -- they break down, you get another one.
Carolyn
As for format changes, I dont believe that will be a problem. Heck, I am even able to run some old Apple II software on an emulation program .
Yes, your're exactly right! I designed our company logo in GEM in 1990. See if you can find any programs that will handle that format today.
this is what we are going through at my work, i run a film room for a spinal surgery and research facility. we have hard x-ray films back to the 1910s in storage and are paying dearly for the storage of them. we are continually looking for better ways of maintaining our films especially now that pretty much all films are going to be on cd or other form of media. films on CD that were taken a few years ago are all but impossible for us to bring up on our monitors much less get a clear enough image for our surgeons to use.
You see it in the nuts and bolts of historiography - Clarke's Law is correct, "85% of everything is crap." Problem is that to the people living it which 85% it is, is impossible to know. My family had some bundles of Civil War letters way back when, and an unnamed cousin thought she'd conserve space and save the important stuff by steaming the stamps off and tossing those gossipy handwritten pages. I could cry.
The critical thing is file format; the rest is only 0's and 1's, and as long as you can stay no more than two or three generations back in terms of media you'll be fine. Once they hit a large hard drive somewhere it's somebody else's problem (mine, actually) and the user's problem becomes keeping track of it. Fortunately the days of weird and exotic file formats are receding just as the days of weird and exotic starting mechanisms did in antique automobiles. The inertia afforded by the World Wide Web and a user community that has grown exponentially will see to that. JPG's are going to be around for awhile and when they aren't somebody is going to make a real nice living converting them. That's one nice thing about digital media - it's a lot easier converting TIF files to JPG than it is sitting in a damp graveyard rubbing tombstones or trying to photograph the insides of Egyptian tombs without destroying their contents. Healthier, too.
And, getting back to the 85% rule, not everything should be saved, and it isn't really up to us. "All those moments lost in time, like tears in the rain."
Organization is something you have to give serious thought to, as it can be extraordinarily difficult to find one file out of millions if you don't have an easily understandable system.
I figure that as the harware ages, I'll just keep moving it to new higher-capacity hardware. Beyond physical storage, you have to consider format issues. What's the point of having a file if you can't read it. This is why I like ASCII a lot for text. I suspect it will be a standard for some time to come. Once unicode finally pushes it to the dustbins of history, I'll write a script to convert to the established standard. This will be harder with some data types, but I would strongly encourage folks to use non-lossy compression for anything they want to keep long term. i.e., do NOT use jpeg or MP3 for storing pictures and sound files respectively, because you'll lose fidelity during conversion.
This is something people don't think about much because the standard line is that digital copies are "perfect". This is true when making byte-for-byte copies, but if you are expecting to have to someday convert to a new format, you'll regret using lossy compression.
Nikon D70. Should I or souldn't I?
I have a reel to reel. I also found tapes from when I was 2 years old. I"m putting them on CD for my parents to listen to.
The 9-pin serial port is as old as dirt, yet still in use today.
You want a 'null modem cable' and a "laplink" type program to transfer files between the two computers. I used this technique many years ago, but do not recall how to do it.
Rest assured, it can be done.
There are several types of storage media that might be more suitable for archiving than dye-based CD's and DVD's: phase-change (DVD-RAM) and Magneto-Optical (MO drives). I use both. These are not mainstream products, but they are available. I would welcome anyone's opinions on these technologies.
While digital storage mediums are not permanent in and of themselves, they do offer longer life than films and photographic prints, and most importantly, the images they contain can simply be copied to new/fresh medium without any image quality loss, thereby perpetually extending the lifetime of the original image.
This is a standard CD.
This is an archival quality CD approximately 3 years old. The data still works and is more than 3 years old. It cost 10 times as much as standard CD's
If it's a hard drive, that probably won't work. Hard drives now are IDE, a drive from 1981 is probably some obscure technology like RLL (there were 3 or 4 as I recall).
If it's a floppy in the ATT, there still could be a problem. The connectors back in the day were sometimes 'card edge' style, like the connector edge of a PCI card.
You're correct. Commercial CDs are stamped in an aluminum substrate. CD-Rs are burned onto a layer of reactive dye (think of the old, curly thermal fax paper).
I'll start scanning all the photos I took of my wife and our children before we got a digital camera. Safe long-term storage will always be a problem, but at least now I can have off-site backups of the original photos, which I couldn't do before unless I reprinted the photos (expen$ive).
People need to print their favorite photos on acid-free paper and store them in an acid-free paper album - just like in the good old days. Ditto for any written material one wants to preserve. You have to print it out on acid-free paper. Don't know how long the printers' ink will last, though.
ebay has reel-to-reel tape players. In your case, you only need to play the tape once...to transfer it to your computer.
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