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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."
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But the only reason these archives can be built and maintained is that it is legal to do so, thanks to the hard work of preservationists like Bob Supnik (see his SIMH "old iron" simulation packages) and Warren Toomey who have secured such licenses. Without such permission, many other archives of historical software that I've assembled myself cannot be distributed to the rest of the world.
This is exactly the kind of problem that Danny Hillis and the The Long Now Foundation have been pointing out for years. Digital data doesn't last.
"Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s."
That's why they started the 10k year library project. A part of this project that interests me especially is the Rosetta Project. It's a "near permanent archive of 1,000 languages". It's still a work in progress, so I hope they succeed. In my eyes it's definitely a worthwhile endeavour.
siener's youtube channel
Try one of these for your data archiving. No software dependencies, long media life, etc.
Quite contrary to this story, the advent of digital data storage and the Internet have led to something never before possible in the history of mankind: near instantaneous massive duplication. It is now possible for digital data to be copied effortlessly and transferred all over the globe. The trick, is doing it.
.zip format.
Our data storage needs have kept pace with data storage ability for some time now. I don't see this ending anytime soon. But it might, eventually. It stands to reason that there will come a time when we will have a want of things to store for all the space we have. I don't count on it in my lifetime, but it could happen.
The trick, then, is getting the data from here to there. How do we do it?
1. The written word is still the most important medium of human communication. Project Gutenberg is doing a bang-up job of digitizing AND distributing written works, and this is a project we should all support. I would also like to see a similar project with scientific journals being digitized (if not already) and widely distributed to universities, who can host them publicly or privately.
2. Someone suggested CDs, but these are impractical. CD-r's have a shelf life of 100 years, and CD-RW has even less. These could work as storage medium, but you would have to be diligent in keeping them up-to-date. What we really need is a physical storage method (like CDs) that have the capacity of magnetic storage media, like HDs.
3. Open file formats. It stands to reason that computers will always understand ASCII (or possibly UNICODE) text. It would not be difficult to append text-only information to the end of even very complex documents, that could be retreived even if the file format itself was no longer known. xml-based file formats do this to a degree, but it depends on the universitality of the
4. All of this is useless if we ourselves are not diligent in keeping up with our digital information. In the Middle Ages, copying an old, worn-out parchment or scroll could take weeks, even months. Now it's possible to do it in a fraction of a second, so there's no reason we shouldn't.
I currently keep my important data (emails, writings, website) in the following locations: My hard drive, a backup file on another hardrive, a CD-RW, a CD-R (which I change/update every six months or so) The server at my school, and the my webserver which is offsite. I personally would like to see off-planet massive storage, but until storage space exceeds storage demand, we will always be faced with the question of "What is important enough to backup?"