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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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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...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
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.
I have been pwned because my
Install a web server, publish everything you have, then let Google cache it...
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken. Sure, it might take a lot of time now - but computers in 5 years will do it in a matter of minutes, while serving web pages and mp3's in the background. Come on, nothing is forever.
We probably will enter some sort of digital dark age eventually. I mean, there aren't an infinite number of hard drives in existance. And one day they may start manufacturing only hard drives with hardware DRM in them. Then, one day when the last of the non-DRM hard drives are crashing, we'll either have to not use hard disks (maybe there'll be something new), or get new DRM hard drives. This is actually my one doubt about serial ATA, which otherwise sounds awesome. Can anyone confirm whether or not serial ATA has DRM or not?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Does this include getting your server slashdotted in record time??
They really should warn the people that they are going to be posting a link to their server, and that extremely heavy traffic will arrise.
This has been bantered about by practically everyone in any sort of media outlet. You've got librarians trying to figure out how to store all of the supposed 'research' that exists out here. Journals are going out of print because they can publish faster and easier on the web.
;P
You've got photojournalism people shooting digital because it's faster and offers some image structure advantages at high speed- no negatives to keep around for a 50 year retrospective.
And finally, you'll have the home consumer trying to back up all his photos to CD, organize them, and get thru the thousands upon thousands (note- most neg drawers aren't well organized either, but... ) of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
Nothing will change until this starts happening. Give it 3 to 5 years, or however long it takes joe and Jane to upgrade their computers and start losing stuff. Then some sense will get back into the world
...is Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMuller which looks at a world where all computerized records are wiped out in a great war. They are awash in information but can not read any of it, and thus are reduced to a 1600s to 1800s-style society. Good reading and a good point worth considering.
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.
Slashdot just ran a story like this two months ago. Michael's neurons must have lost its bits.
Maybe it's just me, but whenever it looks like a harddrive is about to die (funny noises, etc. or just getting old) we replace it before it does. Also, we back up critical information, often in more than once place. This sort of practice should, in thoery, prevent this from happening. These things are replacable.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
A number of posters have noted that most people have little of importance on their hard drives. I'm not so sure. One of the trends in historical research has been to refocus analysis on the lives of ordinary people. As it turns out, this is a problem since ordinary people didn't tend to write in the public record. Often, things that were incredibly popular are virtually undocumented because no one thought them important enough to preserve.
Let me offer one example. When historians want to document the impact that computers and the "information revolution" had on people's lives, there's only so much value in the Wired archives, for example. How did everyday people (not e-publishers or the digital literati) interact with machines and each other? This kind of research depends on many small bits of information, and if there is sytematic bias in which (or whose) information gets preserved then research will inevitably be limited by that bias. In short, don't underestimate the value of large numbers of seemingly unimportant documents.
This raises the question: what can be done to preserve the electronic record created by everyday users? Is any preservation medium cheap and easy enough to become ubiquitous in off-the-shelf systems?
Make cheese not war 8:)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view2002-07-01rl.html
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is hardly a new problem. I've heard story about 5 1/4" floppy disks in an archive that were picked up after 10 years or so, they could find a drive, but most of the data was gone. But the same things (though slower) happen to paper, if you don't archive and conserve properly you will be in trouble getting it back. True for digital data as well as for paper, nothing new there...
I think digital data is easier in some way because you can preserve identical copies easily and transfer to an other system is easier as well, try moving/reordering an paper archive.
IMHO, preservation is a major argument for open formats and open source software though. It gives you the change to make sure for yourself you have the format and source to read it preserved with the data. Try getting your hands on Office 95 in, say, 2142...
Computers make it a lot easier to create perfect replicas of any information that you have deemed important. Even if we lose hundred-year-old spam lists, or the more obscure bits of knowledge Jenny from Tunguska has about her pet dog Fluffy (or even most of geocities, for that matter) we will retain anything useful from this era simply because people will keep downloading it and putting it up for others to download.
The peer-to-peer file sharing systems out there are like a public-access ftp server, or a wiki, or any of the hundreds of different ways that information will stay alive when people care to keep it. With a hundred million users all trying to collect as much interesting information as possible, you end up with a reasonable, thorough data filter to make backups for every important piece of classical knowledge that you'll need a few decades from now.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
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I have been pwned because my
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
Along with data copying, technology is delivering home users progressively better storage mediums. From 5.25" to 2.5" floppies, to hard drives, to CD-Rs, each media lasts longer than the previous. We'll eventually get it to archaeological standards.
Try one of these for your data archiving. No software dependencies, long media life, etc.
I just use raid-5 on my fileservers, when a drive dies no data is lost and you don't have to make annoying backups everytime because of this fact. You have to replace the broken drive before another one dies otherwise everything is lost.
For shift.com the dark age has already begun... ./ effect
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.
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
Amen, to that! And more often it's practically a full-time job, just shuffling all of it around, from one over-flowing server to the next.
--Logan
Stuff that matters: circuitbreakers, vacuum-cleaners coffee makers, calculators generators, matching salt+pepper shakers
Which one's more vulnerable, a set of negatives and a single set of prints bent into a camera shop envelope high in my closet, or a digital photo on my hard drive? Sure, hard drives have a designed window before obsolescence, especially in the consumer market. Basically that's because the cost of enhancing their reliability is less than the cost of a whomping new drive that dwarfs the old one every three years. Even so, though -- hey, how many photos do you have from your great great grandparents' trip to Tahoe in the year aught-six?
If we're talking about preserving the works of Aristotle, I'm betting on hard drives to do a better job than monks with feather quills. (Not that the monks didn't draw better pictures in the margins, doodling along the way.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
There are several ways this could go. Obviously, we have to be circumspect, since the U.S. gov't is literally considering copy-control legislation that would make Linux illegal.
You can say it'll never succeed - won't all Linux's rich patrons prevent it? But I would have said the same about quite a few other things that have already happened... and it's in our interests to act as thought it might.
However, assuming something slightly less than the worst, DRM will of necessity be something which you can enable or not. IOW, as long as they'll let you, buy all the fast, new DRM drives you want, and use Linux to run them. Linux will simply ignore the DRM features and use the drive normally.
The problems come when you're forced to use a DRM operating system with your DRM hardware (quite a reversal from the old antitrust days, eh?); you will find it very difficult to take some/all of your data back to Linux/other non-DRM OS.
You can probably see why MS loves this now; DRM technologies, even optional ones, will have the nice effect of preventing interoperability with open source operating systems, thereby locking everyone in even further. Let alone the myriad other possibilities for abuse, censorship, and bottlenecking...
If we allow our government to do this, both in the context of MS's current status as a monopolist, and in the ongoing (anti-) regulation of the media industries, we are doing the gravest disservice to future generations.
We're on the road to Tycho.
If I remember well, it was Umberto Eco who said that the equivalent of the burning of the Alexandria Library, in our modern age, would be massive implosion of the digital devices we use so much.
Wait... that sounds like a massive DDoS attack on the Internet. Reality is definitely getting ahead of fiction here...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I find this to be interesting, but infinitely unimportant. Who cares about my stupid files? Even I myself don't give a rip. If one of my machines crashes or gets 0wN3d by some malware, I reformat and re-install.
.PNG file of Britney Spears where I added big bushy hair growing on her face and abover her lip) needs to have their futuristic head examined.
200 years from now, anything I did that was worthy of recognition will be ingrained in the fabric of what is then. Anyone that seriously cares about the other stuff I did (like that
Bottom line: who cares about the crap we do now 200 years into the future? The good stuff will persist on its own merits and the trash was meant to be forgotten.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Given the propensity of M$ & others to use proprietary file formats in an effort to lock in the client base and to lock out competition. (And don't tell me about standards like because XML [tagged data storage & transport streams] without DTD [document tag definitions aka data context] is pretty damn useless [the difference betweeen data & information.])
I have quite a few files that I can no longer access except as raw byte streams because the applications that created them no longer exist or because the meta data information that controlled that creation is no longer available.
Even printing sh.., uh, stuff, out is pretty useless because most paper is acid based and turns to ash over a very short time. The inks are not much better.
I have books printed in the 17th century that are still quite readable (high rag content acid free paper,) and a 1901 Sears catalog (acid washed wood pulp paper,) that I accidentally put my thumb through in the late '80s.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Remember, if you think your being shortchanged by your hard drive's operation life, read the manual!
You're supposed to keep backups, silly!
Redundant copies of the data, on other HDs or tape or any other media, will allow re-dupblication when one of the redundant pieces fails. Keep that up and your only worry is a catastrophic failure that kills all of your redundant pieces at once.
You reduce the chance of that, BTW, by trying to keep your backups in more than one place.
Now I grant you, no one does backups properly. At least, until after the first few times they get burned.
We're on the road to Tycho.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think that one of the biggest problems when it comes to archival is legal. Often, companies don't want their information archived. After they publish a product, they want it to sell, then just go away. This is the issue with abandonware. If a company releases a game, or program, then stop supporting it, they shouldn't stop people from archiving it. If people don't archive it, it will just dissapear. This is what many companies wan't, but is it really the best thing to have happen?
The biggest problem with maintaining archives may be that some people actually want thier information to just dissapear.
Shame on David Emberton for not instructing his
mum in the fine art and absolute neccesity of
making backups!
"Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it."
However, he does raise an interesting point. There
have been even more spectacular failures than the
Norwegian museum that he refers to; witness the BBC
in the UK's loss of much of their digital archive
due to not having any drives available to read the
optical media any more.
I can see that in 100 years all content that has not
been re-archived onto modern media will cease to exist.
What the long-term solution to this is, I have no idea!
Stone tablets would still seem to be the best way of
recording something for millenia.
A new form of archiving historical data by passing it from generation to generation in the form of humor.
Call it the MPAA or Monty Python Archiving Association. All we need to do is figure out what made this century special and satirize it.
If you don't believe this will work try this experiment: Walk into a technical meeting and say in your best imitation voice "We are the knights who say...."
I guranteed you will get a "Neee!" from somewhere.
With enough people you could probably reconstruct the entire movie, or find one who has the whole thing memorized.
Don't think it will work, well "I fart in your general direction!"...damn, I did it again.
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Floppy Disks.
Yes, They will still be 1.44 MB. They will still be included in all computers. They will still work slowly. But they're reliable! And they will still use FAT12..
*gag* isn't it time this particular media format died
It's one thing to lose technical data, but what about all that stuff that's much more personal and is (will be in 10+ years) sentimental? Things like (digital) baby photos, personal e-mails, etc.
How many people have grandparents who still have a box full of all of the letters they wrote each other when they were younger? OK, a few people might still write the occasional letter to each other, but this is really a thing of the past. And you can't compare the personal effort that goes into actually writing a letter with an e-mail. Just the fact that someone has actually gone to all the trouble to write the letter out makes it infinitely more satisfying when you read it.
How many people in (say) 20 years will have an actual photo album with real photos in it? How many people do you know now that have a photo album you can't view without turning on a computer?
It think it will be in 20+ years when the current digital-data generation are older that these things will really start to tell.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Hardware isn't really a problem. Anything important can be put on a CD-ROM and preserved for eternity with some confidence; except that today the files may largely be in proprietary unpublished formats (e.g., just about any common format you use) that will take significant effort to read fully at an arbitrary point in the future.
The solution is straightforward and well underway, courtesy of the internet and WWW: published open data formats. The only reason for using a proprietary format these days is the effort that software makers put us through to do otherwise. Have you gotten tired of dismissing MS Word's objections to the use of RTF yet?
When we just say no to software that uses anything but open published formats, we'll get the software we need.
ThosEM
Actually, historically, a "Dark" age (there have been several... the so-called "Dark Ages" is merely the longest series of them in Medieval times) is a period of time *during* recorded history when the historical record is in pieces or non-existant. While other problems can be applied to a Dark Age, these are usually causes, but what defines a Dark age is the result: reduced historical record.
There were 2 or 3 in the Roman empire, one that I believe lasted about 30 years. Several more cropped up before and after Charlemagne. A much smaller one is happening with books produced in a specific timeframe in the early 20th century (I disremember which). Because of the acid in the paper, they'll deteriorate and fall apart rapidly. Luckily, project gutenberg is making an effort in getting the info out of books this old.
So, it's OK to be wrong.
OK how do you back up your photos? How do you keep track of your backups? You want to explain that to your mother?
.... what? yes.... I'll come home for dinner".
"Ok Mom, here's what you do. Get your last CD and compare the file stamp on it to the files on your HD. Copy anything that is newer into a temporary folder. Then fire up the burner program and copy those files into the
No, until it's automated backup/automated recovery, it's gonna be a pain in the ass for anyone.
Most systems have 1 hd 1 cdrom. If you're lucky it has a burner.
Hard drive decay is the least of our problems. Protons are decaying, the universe is flying apart at an ever-increasing rate, in a mere 10^(10^26) years there'll be nothing left but infinte, cold, dark, empty space. We're all doomed. Doomed, I say!
Compared to me, democrats are right wing fanatics.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Perhaps IBM's new storage technology, Millipede, could help stave off the impending "Digital Dark Ages".
0 61 1_millipede.shtml
Millipede is such an incredible technology not only because of its ultra-high density, but because the data actually exists in a physical form, albiet on an incredibly tiny scale, unlike current hard drives, which just toss around magnetic charges. Magnets don't last forever, but you seal up a polymer film in a metal case, and it'll last pretty much forever.
IBM dropped their HDD division, but I don't think they'd even think about dropping millipede. This technology could very well be the future of long-term data storage.
I just hope it comes through in a pure format, and soon (without DRM).
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/2002
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
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?"
My most important data on my computer is the pictures from my digital camera. Right now I'm keeping one copy of all the pictures on my hard drive, and as I take more pictures everytime I get ~650 megs worth I burn them onto a CD backup as well. I'd really like to be able to take them off of my hard drive to free up space, but then I hear that CDRs have been known to fail, which would be incredibly upsetting for me. Worse yet would be going back after a couple years have passed and finding that the CDRs have died with age. Of course the worst case scenario would be having my hard drive die in a couple of years, and go back to the CDRs only to find that they died at some unknown point in the past.
As such, does anyone have any recommendations for average people like me out there who have data that is very important to them, but for whom corporate measures like commercial data backup services just aren't practical? Is there a better practice I can do than what I'm doing already? How about specially designed long life CDRs? Does such a thing exist?
Think about it. 98% of what's out on the web is crap. The stuff that's really valuable get's copied, in general. People do mirrors, or download pages. I doubt much of real value will be lost in the long run. I mean, geez, I'm going to be really bummed when my porn collection goes bad, but I downloaded it from others, so it's still out there somewhere.
More and more people, like myself, stopped using floppies and removed the drive from their computer. I don't buy a new one anymore, I have some spare ones laying around somewhere. I think it's been years since I bought a pack of floppies in a store.
In a time when my digital camera can store more than 100 floppies, who needs them? Almost everything that I download or exchange doesn't fit on one anymore. Oh and I never boot from a floppy, I use a bootable Debian CD or something.
People used Zip disks for a while, but that's fading too.
Dave
Hard to say. I was aiming for intersting/insightful with a bit of funny on top.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I don't know what sort of configuration you have, but I'm sure that somewhere out there you can find a tape drive for your machine. Tape drives are cumbersome and hard to move data with, but if you want a long term dependable backup system, tape is a good one that I know if.
~ now you know
With our rapidly increasing HD sizes, backup methods and media aren't keeping up. I've already lost 2 large HD's in the last 2 years, and with my shiny new 80 Gig drives, I've got a Raid-1 setup, but still if they both fail within a short amount of time from each other, I'm outta luck.
Moreover, the advancement of HD tech makes it almost certain that when one fails in a year, I won't be able to get an exact replacement to reload it from the RAID.
Does anyone know of a PRACTICAL way to back up 80 Gig's of info? AHSay.com offers online backups, but the initial backup would take weeks through my ADSL modem, and then incrementals would be pretty much useless. I suppose I could use DVD-RW, but at 4.7 Gig a disk, we're talking 20ish disks, at several hours a piece. And doing incremental backups that way is a nightmare. It seems that my only real option is to use something like a MonsterTape backup storage device, but systems with 80Gig capacities and up START at $4000 a piece, and the tapes are 80 bucks a piece. With 80 gig drives available for $129 bucks (Pricewatch), it doesn't seem like a good option.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
I was being facetious. I don't have a floppy anymore, either. IMHO, what we -should- move to are some sort of universally accepted media such as compact flash or PCMCIA solid-state hard disks - or, more likely, USB Portable Media. I already desperately want a USB Media keychain. But still, carrying around a pocketfull of PCMCIA RAM drives or Compact Flash would be easier than floppys.
1,000 years - is that long enough? We have parchments that are 5,000 years old, we need to match or even exceed that. If civilisation is to come to a thundering catastrophic end, it might not get back up to our level of technology (sufficient to read the disks) for 10,000 years. this is a little better, but I'd like a bit more still.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
You know, I think in many ways it's good to loose stuff like this. Sure, it's upsetting for a while, but you get over it.
Memories are just that - in your memory, and whilst photos are good for jogging memories, that's all they do. For anyone who's not actually in the picture, they mean nothing. And really, it's far healthier to look to the future than reminiscing about past events. This might seem heartless, but how often do you actually look at 10-20 year old photos? Maybe with dead family members it's another matter, but if they were really close, you should be able to remember them without a photo.
And it's amazing how much crap you can assimilate over time. After I went travelling for a year with just a rucksack (two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, etc...) I was horrified when I returned to realise how much junk I had in my parent's house that I'd previously considered important. Most of it went straight in the bin, as I sure as hell wasn't carting it to my next house.
Bringing it slightly back on topic. Yes, I've had hard disk failures. In one case, I even lost about a years worth of mail. But after being initially cross about my mail, I realised that I didn't actually need it anyway. The rest of the stuff I never even missed, as I'd backup up about the 5% that was useful.
For actual important stuff, like source code or documents, you just need to be disciplined enough to copy them somewhere reasonably regularly. I use local CVS for all my own source and just back up the whole tree every couple of days. I download stuff into a folder like '2002-07' for this month, and every month I backup anything to CD that is likely to be useful. Everything else can just be downloaded again, re-MP3'd, etc...
I'm just worried about how long my CD-R's will last...
I wouldn't bother printing everything out because the cheap, wood pulp paper we use today won't last all that long in any useful condition. Note that most of the really old books that survive today weren't done on cheap materials. They were done on animal hide paper (parchment, vellum), etched in stone, or in some rare cases, rag paper (which is mostly plant fiber but sturdier stuff than wood pulp: hemp and cotton).
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Now, sure things are stored on HD's, but they are easly copied to new media... such as DVD-roms, etc. Any technology today has to be able to take data currently written to a HD.
But here comes "Digital Rights Management" or DRM. a hardware and software based double punch to our fair use rights. This is what could prevent us from making back-ups, keep us from moving to new forms of media.
It is the beginning of the digital dark age.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
Go to your public library - to a section of books of interest to you. Note the publication date of a dozen or so and whether the publishing company appears to be still in existance. Now imagine that these books had never been printed in book form but published only on digital media at the time, which was perhaps encrypted and perhaps, like Windows XP, even node-locked to a specific computer.
How many of the "books" would you still be able to read?
How many would you be able to read only by paying a company specializing in copying obsolete media to current media?
How many would you never be able to read without hiring a good "cracker" (whose efforts would probably be illegal under the DMCA)?
This is our future. Spooky, huh?
Important information will be transferred to new drives as people upgrade. When we have the whiz bang drives that store data based on changing isotopes in a hydrogen cell or some such crazy thing with insane density, the important data that is stored on todays magnetic media will be transferred to that.
I think these folks misunderestimate the sheer volume of information we have collected about ourselves. Modern historians have been able to piece together a more or less complete history of the Greek and Roman worlds 2500 years ago using a few thousand written documents and archeological digs. We have more information than we can possibly process for every era of American history for at least 200 years back.
.01% will still probably dwarf the information we currently posess about the world 1000 years from now.
So yes, 99.99% of all information in existence today will probaly be lost 1000 years from now. The remaining
For starters, we still publish about as many books as any other society in history. There are books available on literally every topic available, and most of them have thousands of copies in circulation. So imagine that 99.9% of all books are nuked, chances are the majority of those books will still survive, and historians only need 1 copy to make use of it.
Finally, this article massively underestimates how easy it is to preserve digital information. 10 years from now, terrabyte hard drives will be commonplace, and no doubt second-generation DVD-R's will hold tens of gigabytes of data. All you have to do is copy those files en masse to the latest format every 10 or 20 years, and you've preserved the information. One person can do that in his spare time quite easily. Furthermore, file formats aren't *that* hard to reverse-engineer. Even if the world forgot what a Microsoft Word document looked like (which is extremely unlikely) they should be able to look at the raw data and figure it out well enough to at least read the plaintext. And I doubt we'll ever forget what ASCII means.
As for people losing their personal correspondance-- perhaps 99.99% of people will lose their email correspondance at some point in their lives. So in a nation of 300 million people, that leaves only 30,000 complete email correspondances for future historians to peruse. Imagine how much we'd know about Greek or Roman times if we had the complete correspondance of 30,000 average Greek or Roman citizens...
In conclusion, I think quite the opposite is true. Historians 1000 years from now will have more material than they can possibly process about the early 21st century. The trick will be in assimilating all that information into something useful, not finding enough to work with.
On the internet scale?
Something along these lines?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I wonder why Y2K didn't serve as a wake-up call? Maybe it's because basically nothing bad happened? Yes, it cost a ton of money to correct the problem, but there were no huge catastrophes like segments of the media had predicted.
In the same way, yes, hard drives will crash, and people will lose stuff. But this is nothing new! The idea of a "digital dark age" where hard drives start crashing left and right, and history starts going down the drain, is absurd. It ranks up there with the pre-Y2K hype about society crashing and people roaming the streets in search of food. But hey, your story is a success if people will read it and take the hype to heart, right?
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James
Has anyone ever wondered if; assuming further developements in computing; none of this will matter? Its entirely possible that an artificial intelligence running on molecular scale hardware could have a thinking speed millions or billions of times faster than a human being. A network of these could in one year do more thinking than all human beings in all history. They would create as much or more new knowledge and information in that time period. Essentially, all achievements humans have ever made would be as important as the mating habits of dinosaurs. While its difficult to say whether these AIs would have any interest in our history, the information would hardly be relevant. I do not find this possibility frightening. I have no doubt that the AIs we create will require teaching much like a small child. They will learn everything we pass on to them. Essentially, while humans might eventually become extinct, most of our knowledge and culture would be passed on to some extent. It would be no different than generation changes with biological children. YOU won't live on forever, but your descendents might. Some of what you pass on to your children might last a very long time. That is one of the few legacies we leave behind in this life. In a similar manner, we would leave similar knowledge to artificialy intelligent descendents. They would quickly grow beyond us, much as biological children might become taller and more educated than their parents, but such is the nature of change.
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.
Hello Cruel World
I've heard this complaint so many times and it just doesn't ring true.
If digital storage was like paper storage this would be an issue but the truth is digital storage is unique in 2 ways:
1. You can make infinite perfect copies
2. The storage capacity grows exponentially over time.
I still have papers I wrote 15 years ago. The 20 Meg 5.25" harddrive that they were originally stored was trash 10 years ago along with 3 or 4 other drives that they lived on over the years and yet my papers remain. They remain because I wanted to keep them (and I'm good about protecting my data.) They are on a completely different filesystem (EXT3) on a completely different operating system and yet I can still get to them, read them and print them out. They are now on a RAID 5 array that is backed up to a separate drive with all my other important data.
In the article he states about physical things "Mostly, stuff lasts". That is just not true. How many of those documents that we printed out back in the early 90's before everything was email based are still around? I know several people who have all their email going back 5-10 years. It's simply much easier to keep digital stuff around.
Most people upgrade to a new machine and bring their data over with them. The drives fail but the files that people care about stay. Crashes can be devastating and people certainly do lose data but the same thing can be said about fire in the physical world. Keeping 2 digital copies of important stuff makes it hard to lose it. If you lose one copy, make another one. The odds of losing both before you can make a new copy are very slim.
It's also much easier to keep digital things organized and search through them.
I think digital things in general will always have better lasting power than paper things. Internet based backup services will make this much more so in the coming years. For a few dollars a year you can have all your important files stored somewhere off site on redundant media. Try doing that with paper?
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
(the only thing worse than a spelling mistake in a post is a mistake in the subj:)
When I was in highschool, a friend of mine gave me a picture of her in the park. She was off center and some guy was in the background. Several times I considered taking scissors and cropping that guy out. After all, I didn't know him and he wasn't nearly as cute as she was. Fast forward a few years, and I'm scanning my pics and posting them to my site, and I see the picture of her. Only this time, I recognize the guy in the background. He's a friend of mine now. So you never know what'll be important or interesting later, and you don't always need to wait a few hundred years for your perception to change.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I was asked my my employer to find a way to archive digital photograhs for 100 years. My solution? Print them to black and white film as "color separations" (R, G, B).
Will my grandchildren be able to read my emails to my parents? Nope.
Journals are especially valuable to the future historian...
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Think about it for a second. Any thing that humans truly deem worthwhile for saving is copied an backed up. It's always been that way since the begining of time. How else do books like the Bible and the Quaran remain? If the future is truly interested in learning about us, they will find a way to read our crashed hard drives. Worrying about the loss of our information is like the greeks worrying that in the future, no one would be able to read their language. Anything that is truly relevent for humans is passed on from generation to generation, it may be different media, but it's still the same idea.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
A more modern threat is lawyers. Many corporations are putting record/email retention policies in effect that intentionally destroy data so that it can't be subpoenad in a future legal proceding.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And I find it arrogant that you assume my information won't be valuable. The inane babblings of the dominant cultural leaders of a time are not nearly as useful to archaeologists as the information left behind by common individuals. The people who write the record don't accurately represent the lives and spirits of average people.
I think we have an opportunity with technology to preserve more than the party line, the "fiction agreed upon" by history's victors.
You say something to the effect that if your loved ones are all that important, you should be able to remember them without a picture.
But even if this were so, how do you show your child what his granddad looked like, who died before your child was born??
The point of archiving data is not just so YOU can remember it. It's so people who had no chance to see it firsthand can also get a look at how things were (regardless of the sort of data it is).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How soon we forget. As discussed a short while ago, IBM's new storage format could be a step toward more permanent storage, at least compared to the physical deterioration of magnetic and optical media: IBM 's Hyperpunchcards
Digital Data is the most fluid data storage system ever created. If information is truly important it will transverse from storage system to storage system as the systems change. When I got a computer I typed my documents on word processors and stored them on floppies. When hard drives came out I copied the floppies to the hard drive. When cd's came out i burned my harddrive files to cds. When DVD's come out I burned the CD's to DVD. The rate of growth of the storage medium is great enough that no data need be lost. If its extremely important....have backups...duh.... And as far as people dying. Since when does being dead make your password unhackable???.... With the future of storage medium heading towards holograms and other futuristic storage mediums I don't forsee a loss of any truly important data. And there's a lot of data that doesn't truly need to be kept....just like my garage acumulates junk I no longer need.....
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
I mean, not to flame this guy, but his mom loses some email and suddenly there's going to be a time where all digital information stored on hard drives is lost?
Jesus, it's not like every hard drive on the planet is going to die simultaneously at an unknown future date....and in the meantime, new hard drives are manufactured and new storage media ara invented, did it ever occur to him that people might migrate their data along the way?
Horrible, horrible article.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
A few years ago, I spent many days loading tapes that contained the archives of the Stanford SAIL computer, from the old AI lab at Stanford. That data has been preserved. Contact Bruce Baumgard at IBM Almaden Research if you ever had a SAIL account, and he can give you your old files on a CD-ROM.
IBM maintains a large corporate archive that is copied over from one medium to the next as necessary. But IBM is a century-old company. Few other companies have that sense of time.
There was actually a story about this on slashdot a month or so ago - there's a group of people trying to figure out how to mark nuclear waste storage sites so that it's still clear they're dangerous thousands of years from now. That's just one example - the fact of the matter is, there are quite a few things we really probably should try to Make Damn Sure our descendents don't forget, even if civilization somehow magically collapses. Radiation is bad for you, for example. Boiling water makes it clean - simple, but do you know how many people die even today from waterborne bacteria? Too damn many.
In short, any data that really DOES matter to the survival of the species probably really should be etched into a pyramid or monolith or something.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I know this contradicts another post I made to this thread, but is the collapse of civilization worth worrying about? I mean, civilization was a much more fragile thing when humans numbered in the millions and a village of 1,000 people was considered pretty damn big. A big storm or famine could destroy civilization, at least locally, but enough people would be left to pick up the pieces.
That isn't true now. Even in the event of fairly major war, plague, etc., there is usually going to be someplace that can stay "civilized", that can retain technology and culture, and assist in recovery efforts. Example: World War 2 left Europe in pretty bad shape, but the Marshall Plan helped turn those bomb-churned fields back into producers of tasty crops. Mmm...crops. Sorry, I'm hungry.
My point is, the only things that could destroy all civilization on Earth - which would be the only way to end civilization, even temporarily - would all have the nasty tendency to end human existence on this planet. Nuclear war could do this, for example. Or maybe a superplague. Or a Big Freakin' Asteroid. All these things could "end civilization", but they'd be unlikely to leave enough human survivors to carry on the species. Remember, if it ISN'T a total global catastrophe, civilization will survive somewhere.
So why worry about saving info for potentially barbaric descendents? If civilization dies, humans are probably screwed anyway.
I'm the stranger...posting to
If he is so smart, why does he say "nukular" instead of "nuclear"?
Yeah. It's pronounced "nuc-u-ler."
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Great. Its wonderful to know that grandma might lose all her important documents because she fails to follow proper backup procedures, but if I said something silly on usenet 20 years ago, google's caching and redundancy will ensure that it'll still be available for hundreds of years to come.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Because the pretense that your computer is still for making "art" of your own must be maintained, the system will be capable, as you describe, of hosting "escaped" content.
There are two big points to keep in mind about DRM:
- As you are no doubt already aware, it's a stupid idea - it will never work.
- They're going to do it anyway, and if our government is foul enough to force the issue, they'll completely fuck up the computer industry in the process.
The big news is in the potential for abuse; DRM will make it much harder if not impossible for MS's competitors to interoperate legally, and surveillance and censorship will become commonplace.We're on the road to Tycho.
IDE disk drives are amazingly cheap, and getting cheaper. So use mirroring and removable-drive drawers. 100GB of space costs about $100, if you don't mind slower IDE drives. So get a couple of those removable-drive drawers (~$25 for the mounting, and $12 for extra drawers), and an extra IDE controller if you need it, and copy all your files to it. Stick a copy of the important stuff on the shelf (or in your safety deposit box) and do it again. Pick your favorite flavor of RAID or mirroring - for small systems, it's much easier to be wasteful and do complete mirrors; for larger systems it's much more efficient to do RAID, so that WHEN you lose one of your drives, you can recover. As long as Cheap Disk Drives keep exceeding Moore's Law for price/capacity, you keep winning, and the removable drawers mean you can easily pop the new bigger drives in and out. And always make sure to copy all your old files to the new drives before the old drives become unusable - tapes and removable-media disks are the worst offenders. Got any 8" floppy drives?
Use Backup Software, and Back Up To New Machines when you upgrade.The two big reasons that data gets lost are failing hardware (addressed by mirroring) and accidental/deliberate erasure/updating/scribbling. Use backup software to deal with that, preferably some kind of software that doesn't use proprietary data formats. Journaling file systems can be really good places to put things, if you're on an open operating system. Backups are another excellent use of Cheap Disk Drives in Drawers.
Avoid File System Format Dependence by CopyingIt's nice to keep backup media in well-documented file system formats, but it's also critical when you get computers with new file system formats to copy your old backup data to the new computers
Data formats are the hard part - Use Open Standards Whenever Possible. Keep all of your software installation disks, however obsolete. MSWord is evil - too much complexity, too little documentation, too little compatibility. HTML is great, because it's human-readable and easily parsed, and it's a content description language (or was in the past), not a black-marks-on-paper description language. Graphics formats - If you can use open-source standards without major differences in compression, use them, because you can also store format descriptions and conversion software. And be sure to label stuff so you know what it is - README files as well as on the outside of the media.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks