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The Digital Dark Age
zygan wrote to mention a Fairfax Digital article about the possibility of a digital dark age, as a result of the increasingly short-term lifespan of digital storage. From the article: "It is 2045, he suggests, and his grandchildren are exploring the attic of his old house when they come across a CD-ROM and a letter, which explains that the disk contains a document that provides directions to obtaining the family fortune. The children are excited. 'But they've never seen a CD before - except in old movies - and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?'"
perhaps the same way I would read a wax cylinder today
i nder.html
visit a specialist
a good place to start would be here :
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/wtmcyl
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
as the CD probably couldn't be read regardless. CDs do not last forever. http://www.warehousephoto.com/How_Permanent_is_you r_CD-R.htm In fact many will be unreadable in as little as 2 years. If you want to archive, print it with good ink on acid free archival paper.
people migrate their data to new technologies all the time.
Think about it. A person gets a new computer with the latest technology, then they transfer their data to the new machine.A contant upgrade cyscly.
Same with lerge businesses, they may be using a tape library, but they upgrade there tapes regularly. And if some came out with a 1000 terabytes in a cubic inch of crystal storage device, they would also ahve a way to migrate there clients data. If they didn't they would have a hard time selling any.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't forget about CD Rot. While you'd like to believe that if you put that Treasure Map on a CD so you can find the treasure years from now, chances are... your map will have disspeared on you.
This is why I still get my digital photos developed. Last thing I want is all my treasured memories to become suddenly un-readable someday.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
I'd think bmp would be preferable to jpg. bmp is to images what .txt is to text (and while ASCII is arbitrary, it's a single substitution cypher, and therefore easily crackable) -- the simplest, uncompressed format. I've written 1-bit (black and white) bitmaps by hand. I couldn't ever hope to do the same in jpeg.
I think its safe to say, with the number of people who showed up on Qlink using real Commodore 64s reciently, that there will be no shortage of "Crazy old guys" in the near future.
Unless I want to build custom hardware, I don't believe it can be done...
There are service bureaus that will read those disks and stick the data on a secured server to download. Hell, you can even get paper tape and hollerith cards read for you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have heard the same for photographs. Today's photographic paper isn't the same as older stuff, with less silver, and it tends to fade quicker. While we can rely on 100 year old photographs, our decendents may not. Most paper nowdays is relatively acidic as well, so it breaks down faster with any exposure. This would mean books as well. While there is good paper that is better than the old stuff, most is made to be cheap, not high quality.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I dunno, I doubt it'll be impossible to read a CD even in 90 years.
Even today, you can find places to convert old 8mm home movies into a more modern format.
CD-ROM drives are resilient devices; I'm sure millions of them will survive in working condition for many decades. Some will eventually be owned by data conversion services that will do this for you.
You can still readily find equipment to play 78RPM records, reel-to-reel tape, 9track computer tapes, TK50, and other dead formats. It may be difficult, but not impossible to recover your old data in 50-100 years.
Whether the CD media will hold up that long is another story. Polycarbonate is pretty stable, but we're talking a long time during which an accident could happen. An accident that merely tears or crumples paper can destroy a CD!
-Z
Yep. I worked selling printers for Epson for a while. Even their good (consumer) archival paper is only rated 80-100 years, when using their good archival level printer (about $700 USD). Supposedly their cheaper printers would get 50-80 years when using archival photo paper and the normal inks.
Of course, that's their own ratings, so I dunno how accurate it is.
probably true? how about IS true.
I have a side business as a data mage. I have a nice collection of very VERY old dat astorage reading/writing devices that sit un-used for 99.997% of their life now. but every once in a while I get a call from a friend of a friand's colleague. and I make a very tidy sum reading the files off of that Bernulli disk or 9 track tape in ebcdic format and but it to a modern format like CD.
There are several of us that exist, and there always be some that will have the ability to read long forgotten data formats. Hell I bet I have a working paper tape reader here somewhere.
My ex wife called me a fool for buying and keeping all this "crap" as she calls it until the day that I dragged a 9 track tape reader into the living room, set up an old XT that was able to use the isa card that connected to the drive and spent the afternoon reading 5 tapes to the drive and then transferring via rs232 to my laptop to burn to CD.
I made $8000.00 in one afternoon because I was the only one able to help them.
She finally shut the hell up when I returned with that check and threw it on the table next to the bills.
There are businesses that make their good living off this exact need.
My biggest customers are small businesses wanting 5.25 disks read or the popular bernulli's or the odd TRS-80 business compter disk (Model III and Model VI types typically) that needs to be read. I do turn away business, some balk right away at the price I charge, but I knw they will not find someone else locally and certianly not near my low price nationally. This help seperate the curious from the real customers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My advice is pick the really important things to preserve and save them well. eg- print it out. Everything else: just do the minimum, and throw away the crap. Most of it will probably be fine anyway, for our lifetime, but the important stuff you've already taken care of.
(btw, the specific problem with burnt CDs is the decay of the organic dye, iirc. the blue ones last the longest.)
must... stay... awake...
Periodically rolling over data from its existing format/media to the latest new fromat/media before the media or format life expires (whichever comes first) is the only way to perpetually save data. The problem is not in having a reliable method to preserve data. It is an unwillingness on the part of the guardian of the data to spend the resources (operational overhead) necessary to do it. The perceived value of historical data is often viewed by how often it is accessed as opposed to what future insights might be derived from it or what commercial value it might have in markets that do not yet exist. In other words we lose data because operational management doesn't see its contribution to the bottom line on the profit and loss statement. The reality is that these judgements evintually do have to be made because we just don't have enouth bandwidth to store all of the data that ever existed even if we wanted to. Until everyone recognizes that maintaining your data is no different than maintaining any other valuable asset such as highways and city buildings the situation wont change.
.......Just my 2 cents worth
So, if you want to have the map to the family fortune readable in 50 to 100 years, store it in the highest linear (uncompressed) resolution available to you and every time there is a paradigm shift in digital media or formats transfer the data again to the new format linearly at the same resolution is the original. If you compress the data and then transcode to a new compression format some data will be lost in each iteration and eventually the data will be unusable.
Check this link regarding the Electronic Records Archive http://www.archives.gov/era/index.html
I develop photographs for a living. I can tell you right now that matte finish paper is much better than this glossy crap that everyone seems to like nowadays. Glossy paper is not only more acidic, but it can "smudge" if handled too soon out of the developmental process. There is also the fact that glossy paper retains skin oils more than even regular writing paper... In essence you get tons of fingerprints all over your pictures, and the oils from those prints eat into the paper over a short period of time. This is not a problem with matte paper, as it contains a higher silver content, and has a more textured surface that doesn't retain skin oils to the degree of glossy paper. Matte paper photos also don't fade as fast as glossies when exposed to direct sunlight. Matte photographs also produce better results when scanned, and require alot less color, hue, brightness and contrast manipulation in Photoshop when creating copies from a print. I've noticed that with glossies, you get colors that are overly bright, and the reflective shiny surface of the paper (the same shiny surface that makes the photos hard to see at certain angles in bright light) can throw off digital scanners a bit and make the colors off-balanced. For instance: If you scan a black & white glossy and a black and white matte photo of the same subject matter, the results from the glossy make the black appear as a greenish color while the results from the matte photo are identical to the original. The supply cost for the each paper is the same (At least up until you get into the 11x14 - 12x18 range, then matte cost slightly more since it isn't as common as glossy), so I encourage people to use matte. BTW - Almost all of the professional photographers in my area (Jamestown/Erie/Buffalo/Niagra) choose matte photographs for their personal collections. They get glossy prints only for customers who want them.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
I'm not sure about Wordstar, but I'm fairly certain with MS Works that if you open up that file in your favorite text editor that your data will be in there, and you should be able to just copy it out. Naturally you'll lose all the formatting, and probably have a lot of crappy unreadable characters introduced, but I'll bet you'll recover the bulk of it.
.txt files now. Anyway, I wanted to say that I can definitely feel your pain with a problem like that, but that there are solutions to at least one of the problems you described.
I had a similar issue once with a very nice (but very dead) word processing program that I used to use called WriteNow -- where the developer has stopped work and sales on the product but refuses to release it even in binary form to the public -- I had a bunch of disks of documents, but none of the original program disks and no computer with it installed anymore. I was pretty stuck until I just opened up the files one day and searched through them until I found the plain text. A few minutes of cleanup in BBEdit later, and I was ready to go.
Needless to say, they're all stored as
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