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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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Install a web server, publish everything you have, then let Google cache it...
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.
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:)
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 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
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.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Try one of these for your data archiving. No software dependencies, long media life, etc.
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."
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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