Digital Domesday Defies Doom

Hulver writes "The BBC Domesday project, originally completed in 1986 and under threat (as reported in this old slashdot story) has had its data recovered. The contents of the laserdiscs have been put on DVD, and new programs written so that PCs can access the data. Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. Full details of the recovered data are at the Public Record Office website."

Comments

storage space

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. "

This is why I have all my CDs stored as .flac, so I can be laughing in the distant future when everyone has crappy mp3s just because they wanted to save some space decades ago when 700 meg was a lot.

graspee

Quality

[hackwrench]

...re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained.

That's great as long as the film hasn't degraded to worse than the quality of the laserdisc images and the resolution is there to begin with.

The wonder of modern methods.

[Anonymous Coward]

Domesday Book, vellum and ink, still readable after 900 years.

Domesday Book II, Laser disks and computer files, in need of rescue after 17 years.

Progress ?

Re:The wonder of modern methods.

[adri]

Doomsday 1 - text and possibly sketches.

Doomsday 2 - text, sound, moving pictures, photographs, cross-linked statistics and from how its been described a very intense lookup system.

Yup. Progress. Things have changed significantly in 17 years. I just hope people learn from these kinds of media mistakes.

Re:Your forget one thing though

[IvyMike]

I wonder if widespread printing, audio, and video recording technology might have a long-term stabilizing effect on language.

M$ format = they'll have to do the same again

[cabalamat2]

The guarenteed way of protecting data against time is to make lots and lots of copies. The internet is the perfect medium for that. So yes, why don't they put it on the internet?

Becasue they are stupid, probably.

The ironic thing is that because they have decided to convert it to a proprietary Microsoft format, they will probably have to repeat the exercise in another 15 years. Bloody idiots.

Static media is really no use

[Moderation abuser]

It's clear that any specific format will last for a while and then be obsoleted within a decade or so.

Therefore transferring the information from format to format automatically as new and cheaper solutions arrive. This means a process and to simplify and reduce costs, some automatic tools to do the job.

There are hierarchical storage management[1] solutions around which can do this for you, Tivoli do quite a good one, but, because we're talking long term, the software really also needs to be cross platform and open source.

[1] http://itmanagement.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HSM.html