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Lockheed Chosen For Electronic Records Archives

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the things-i-need-for-my-basement dept.

TrentL writes "How will we be able to read 1990's email messages in the year 2090? Will GIF files still be accessible in 2105? The US National Archives - tasked with preserving records "for the life of the republic" - has chosen Lockheed Martin to solve exactly this problem. Lockheed was awarded the $308M Electronic Records Archives contract after a year-long design competition. Full Disclosure: I worked on Lockheed's demo team."

2 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not? by tabkey12 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The specs could easily be lost over a long period of time, and it's very hard to reverse engineer algorithms from scratch (given that in 100 years, newer and more optimal algorithms than, LZW will be used). It's predicted that the only image format that will still be around in 100 years is ppm, simply because it only takes about half an hour to implement from scratch!

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  2. Re:Why not? by drsmithy · · Score: 4, Informative
    They are now some plastic in plastic. These CDs/DVDs will last less than 10 years (and probably closer to 5).

    Even that's pretty generous IMHO. In my experience, recent blank CDs (and DVDs) are lucky to make out 18 months, and many of mine are delaminating or corroding after only 12. I've now gotten into the habit of burning two copies of everything I "archive", and re-burning them every 12 months. Thus far I've had errors, but never errors in the same place on each copy.

    Contrast this to the good old "Kodak Gold" CDs I was burning onto back in 1996, almost all of which are still readable with 0% errors...