Digital Dark Ages?

angkor writes "The digital dark age--Will all the information from this computer age slowly vanish as our delicate hardrives expire? That's what it looks like. Better start printing everything out."

Comments

Dark ages?

[zero_offset]

Well, it's a new definition for "dark ages", that's for sure.

I was under the impression that the defining characteristics of the dark ages was ignorance, suppression, warfare, famine, strife -- you know, BAD STUFF.

And by that I mean, worse than simply forgetting something you wrote down somewhere.

Sometimes I really wonder about the things you guys elevate to "front-page article" status...

Re:Dark ages?

[Hektor_Troy]

I was under the impression that the defining characteristics of the dark ages was ignorance,
Witness George W. Bush, the Senate, the House and 50% of the US population.

suppression,
Witness DMCA, PATRIOT, RIAA etc.

warfare,
Witness the War on Drugs, War against Terrorism, War against Poverty not to mention all the real wars and civil uprisings around the world.

famine,
Witness Africa.

strife
Witness MS vs GPL, RIAA and MPAA vs Consumers etc

you know, BAD STUFF
Witnes Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. Now - picture them in an XXX-rated movie.

Re:Dark ages?

[Anonvmous Coward]

'Dark age' refers to a decline in literacy stemming from political chaos and social disorder.

And we all knoe wot IRC and ICQ has dun to our grammar skillz. ROFLMAO

Re:Dark ages?

[Archfeld]

But would they have be so vulnerable and without leadership if half their uper class kids were not retarded from cumulative lead poisoning ? We spent nearly a week debating this point in history class....This and maybe the popes' failure to allow Edward8 to have a divorce may possibly be 2 of the biggest turning points in history.

No because...

[ObviousGuy]

Anything that's worth backing up has already been backed up on tape.

You honestly don't think that the contents of your hard drive have any sort of historical importance, do you?

Just because you've saved every free pr0n pic you've ever downloaded and categorized them neatly doesn't mean that some future archeologist is going to find them interesting. I can find them useful immediately. Please send any such collection to me at my hotmail address. Thank you.

Re:No because...

[Anonymous Coward]

Archeologist 1: What is this? All these people are naked or in various stages of becoming naked.

Archeologist 2: Come look at these. These people seem to be having sex.

1: How can this be? In 2002 the righteous Taliban Leader Ben Lahd cleansed the earth of all sinful desires. These files seem to have been created in 2007, long after Ishdan swept the globe.

2: I'll, um, take these home and examine them. I'll get to the bottom of this.

1: If you don't mind, I'll examine the files with the naked men.

2: Sure Lt. Malda.

The solution

[bentriloquist]

Install a web server, publish everything you have, then let Google cache it...

Re:The solution

[ranulf]

I can't beleive no-one's mention's Linus Torvald's famous sig:

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;) -- Linus Torvalds

It's been tried ...

[Hektor_Troy]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view2002-07-01rl.html

Just printing out is not enough!

[maxwell demon]

You know, bad paper holds about a hundred years only; good paper may hold much longer, but only if stored well. In a few thousand years, much of our current paper will probably have gone. And the next fire will destroy it completely anyway.

No, if your data really has value, carve it in clay and burn it. Or carve it in stone. While those methods are still not completely safe, they are at least reasonably safe.

Given the amount of data to store, we should probably build pyramids again, and carve our data into the stones of the pyramids. Given how long the Egypt pyramids lasted, this seems like a really secure way of storing the data.

Of course, I don't want to be an archaeologist in a few thousand years trying to decipher those strange texts e.g. inside the Linux Kernel Pyramid...

Re:Just printing out is not enough!

[Ayon Rantz]

Of course, it does seem like a relatively reliable storage medium, but by itself offers nothing more in terms of security :)

Ah, but you forget about the curse of the mummy ;)

For posterity

[ObviousGuy]

F5
F5
F6 (damn)
F5
Reply
FP!
Submit
F5 (damn)
Reply
*BSD is dying!
Submit
F5
F5
(continue for 6 hours as all editors seem to be asleep)
F5
Reply
FP!!! Eat my frosty piss, muthafuckas!!
Submit
F5 (damn)
F5

already begun

[tijsvd]

For shift.com the dark age has already begun... ./ effect

Re:just use raid-5

[AgTiger]

> and you don't have to make annoying backups everytime because of this fact.

This assumes that only one drive in the array will fail at a time, and between complete verified drive rebuilds. The Raid 5 drive arrays I've seen put together are usually built from a group of new drives, all the same drive model all purchased at the same time. I've seen enough bad production runs for various hard drives to know that it is _too_ easy to get stuck with a group of lemons.

Now imagine a lemon fails. You slap in the replacement, and think all is well, you order another hot-swappable replacement. While it's on the way, two more drives fail. To use a quote in backdraft, that little blinking light in the corner of your vision is your career dissipation light, and it just went into overdrive. ;-)

The following additional situations make me think offsite, up-to-date backups are still a VERY good thing:

- Lightning strike or massive power surge
- Water damage (pipe breaking?)
- Drop-damage (well, actually it's the sudden stop)
- Fire (I'm sure SOME companies have a Milton working for them)
- Earthquake
- Tornado
- Hurricane
- People unexpectedly parking their vehicles in your building, violently.
- Pissed off employees with physical or electronic access to the data
- Theft/burglary

And let's not forget good old human nature. "Oops, I didn't mean to delete that..."

"He who laughs last usually had a VERIFIED backup."

Re:This surprises you how?

[quakeroatz]

and get thru the thousands upon thousand....snip....of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.

Well you could try this new fangled organization tool, you probably already have it installed, it was a joint MS,*NIX and Sun collaboration:

mkdir summer_pics_2002
mv *newpics* summer_pics_2002

Now that wasn't so hard was it?

Re:Yes, this is worrisome

[Telastyn]

Unfortunately the main record of every day users will probably be Slashdot archives, IRC logs, and web forum flames. Historians of the future will wonder how we ever evolved from the barbarism...

giant rock

[cifey]

If a giant rock hits the planet killing all the humans but leaving all the hard drives then we might have trouble. As it is, valuable information will continue to be transferred to newer better technology, much more so than any other time in history.