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

This Is An Ancient Problem

[sqlzealot]

The problem of saving old data has existed as long as there has been writing. More than 90% of the works of ancient the more famous Roman or Greek authors have vanished, to say nothing of the more lesser known writers. We know this because they are mentioned in other texts but the actual text is lost.

The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.

Re:No because...

[analog_line]

You obviously haven't been on an archaelogical expidition ever. Most of what archaeologists and the anthropologists who tag along with them are concerned with, is the trash of past societies and cultures. Most often, the shards of pottery that they laboriously extract from the ground are in so many shards because they were discarded by their original owners/makers.

Your trash says an awful lot about you, as does the random splay of stuff strewn around your room. Future archaeologists may not be interested in the porn on your hard drive (unless they have to dig it out), but future anthropologists would find it very interesting (and not in the normal manner people find porn interesting, though that may be there too, never know). It says alot about you, an inhabitant of wherever you are, living in the year 2002, as does all the collected sundry data on your drive. It may certainly seem boring as hell to anyone else, but historians and anthropologists can get a whole lot of useful information out of it. It's no less boring than reading through book after book, or letter after letter in the dead tree sense, and in some ways it's alot easier, as you can't write a regular expression to pull whatever interesting tidbits you are looking for out of a book.

Eon-long sotrage options...

[Lumpy]

first, we need to think logically.. Every bit of information we have discovered that is aincent was discovered by sheer luck and accident. NOONE back in 985 BC set aside the stone tablets thinking that "someone will want to read this in 3000 years. EVERYTHING we find out about the past has been accidental. Nothing has ever been intentional archives preserved for the distant future.... If there were we might have a whole bunch more knowledge than we do today. (we re-invent things every 50 years.. because we lose how it was done 100 years ago.. My great grandfather's workshop was filled with things that were over 100 years old yet I have seen marketed today as "A TOOL BREAKTHROUGH! The Self Ajdusting wrench!")

I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography.... Even the blurry shots of the floor (Hey it might make a good background) Granted, CDROM's will be non-existant in 20 years.. but it's replacement will be here BEFORE it goes away.... so I transfer it... or my kids will or my grandchildren... Just like how I transferred my parent's and grandparents legacy media to current (Film, photos, Encode a Edison phonograph tube to mp3.... etc...)

It takes PEOPLE to make information survive... no magical device or media will.

Re:Problems are legal, not technical

[HiThere]

Not entirely. 20 years ago, perhaps 30 by now, we wrote a bunch of specialized census information onto 556 BPI 7-track odd parity tapes, and some onto 556 BPI 7-track even parity tapes. And some tapes that were mixed mode, with specialized software to read them. The IBM 7094 goes away, and we switch to an emulator running on a 360. Slowly, and without much plan, we start switching over to programs that run native on the 360. Finally there's OS change, and the emulator goes away (i.e., we aren't willing to pay the service bureau enough to keep it's license current). Some of the tapes haven't been converted yet, but that's no problem. 7-Track tapes are a long established standard, and everyone has a bunch of drives, even though the new 9-Track drives can't read them. Put the tapes into storage. Fast forward a decade. Lots of the documentation has been lost, but surely we could read them if we needed to. Another decade .. it turns out that tapes become unreadable if left to themselves even in a temperature controlled vault, we'd better pull them out an check, probably copy them all over. But where do we find a 7-track tape drive? There are a few places, but nobody even half-way close. And they're expensive. And we don't really know for sure that we can read the tapes. And ... we dither. But we aren't really paying much attention to the problem either, we just aren't deciding what to do, so we keep the tapes in storage while the number of 7-track tape drives dwindles, and the magnetic domains become weaker, and the documentation becomes sparser....

So when it comes time to do a time series study, 1960 doesn't get included. Nobody knows how to get at the information. Or whether or not it even still exists.

There may be legal problems, but there are also both organizational and technical problems. And they are all significant. In this case all of the factors would have needed to cooperate to get the problem solved. And to maintain their cooperation over time.

And we still don't know how important the loss of that data was. We may never know. It could have been worth multiple millions, or nothing. We can't even tell. So everyone is just ignoring the event, because it's too uncomfortable to think about. And while we ignore it, there are the tape cartridges from an IBM 3330 that are sitting around in storage, because somebody wanted them cleared off his desk. And that kind of tape cartridge was only in use for a few years, and was never widely popular. Nobody knows what's on those cartridges, but it probably isn't as important as the census data might have been. And it's probably unreadable too. And I have a box of 5 1/4 single density floppies that have the original source code for one of our major projects. If there is a version that got converted, I don't know where it is. And I don't have a 5 1/4 inch drive. When I got them, I has a Mac (made great sense to give them to me, huh?), and by the time I was coerced into a PC, the PCs only had 3 1/2 inch drives. So it never made sense for me to have them, and I don't even use the project. But I have the only copy that I know about. Maybe it won't be important.

Data is already evaporating right and left. I see it happening every day. Most times it doesn't matter much, but you can't always tell at the time. And often the reasons that it evaporates are technical. And organizational. Legal problems are rarely the issue, though they can be in unusual circumstances, like proprietary software that the company stops maintaining for some reason (like going out of business).