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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?'"
Nevermind the equipment needed to read it, what about the rights they'll need to read it?
... the Powerhouse Museum's Matthew Connell with an ancient clay tablet that will probably outlive the 1980s tape in his right hand.".. Probably? Definitely more like!)
And even that's ignoring the fact the CD will long since have self destructed, decaying away..
(From TFA: "Dark age
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Whatever is worthwhile to keep will be migrated to new media. Even if 90% of it is lost odds are 10 times more information will be preserved from this decade than the last. Digital media is cheaper to own and operate.
How can they read my obsolete digital document?
The same way we do it today: emulators. Of course, your cdrom is not going to survive that long, so there's no need to worry about that. Have you considered leaving your legacy carved into stone tablets?
Hopefully someone isn't stupid enough to store their will on a CD rom...would you?
To each his own.
I have a bunch of old DSDD 40-track hard-sector TRS-80 5.25" floppy disks (NEWDOS/80v2 format) that I'd love be able to read.
... uh ... well, OK, twenty to twenty-five years old.
Unless I want to build custom hardware, I don't believe it can be done...
And those are only
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Even resorting to paper these days you want to make sure you've got archival quality equipment.
Some inkjet pages fade considerably in just two years. After a decade they may just be yellowing pages with no discernible content.
..a more likey outcome is that patents and DRM will lead to a digital dark age.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Make your problem Google's problem: Mail yourself all your archive files to your Gmail account
All too often these are literally rotting away in storage, because the originals are decaying, and the movie companies are unwilling to invest money to rescue them, even though they would sue you for millions if you published these on your own.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Media evolution and subsequent obsolescence is what keeps may photographers from adopting digital cameras. Slide film images, though not "forever," are certainly more enduring and readily adaptable via scanning to whatever digital storage medium is the current state of the art.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
... except for stuff that has copy protection on it...
why? because anything anybody wants to preserve they will either copy it over to newer larger space media or the archiologist will build the device to read the old media.
if there is any concern its with teh ability of the media to hold data... but we were all told how much better cds are to tape and floppy at holding information....
so its on the media industry to be sued when the truth is exposed....????
cd's are to last at least 100 year???
of course there is always writing it out and storing it in some cave at the dead sea site...
paper. Use it. Maybe give a copy to the family lawyer who handles grandad's will and shit, also on paper. The stuff isn't going away any time soon. Like, ever.
In 2045 there will still be functional CD drives around, because they are a mass market item. There are still Edison wax cyclinder "record" players around too. Data loss due to format changes are the biggest problem where rare or custom machinery is used, such as at NASA.
There is a huge difference between losing some data and losing all, or nearly all, of it, as in a Dark Age. Yeah, losing the key to the family fortune is a bit tragic for the family, but it already happens all the time without any reference to digital storage, and nobody declares a "Dark Age" over it.
In any case, dark ages aren't even defined by the loss of data, per se. They are the defined by the loss of data because reading and writting itself is lost and/or denigrated. It was not so much the burning of the library at Alexandria that created a dark age, it was the lack of social importance placed on recovering and preserving what had been lost.
People ceased to backup.
At the time backing up was labor intensive and expensive. Now it is quick, easy and cheap. Even, comparitively, for obsolescent/obsolete data storage devices. If the family fortune is really anything substantial it will be recovered because the knowledge of how to recover is maintained and the CD itself still exists.
Nothing has actually been lost, it's just a cost/labor issue to recover.
KFG
The example's contrived. I don't like contrived examples unless they illustrate an important principle, which this one doesn't really do. Such data loss has already started happening even in my own life, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The fairly minimal effort required to keep data up-to-date is a natural impediment to a policy of keeping everything. Data which isn't worth a new hard drive and an rsync dies. Data which isn't worth the effort of importing and re-saving in a newer format dies. This isn't bad. It's not new either.
Data goes the way of the dodo not because of technological obstacles, but because of a decision made or not made to preserve it. We don't know how the great pyramids were built, the obelisks shaped and erected, etc. not because there was no way to preserve that information, but because it wasn't important enough to justify the effort. The same is true of 10-yr-old WP documents I made to bill people when I mowed lawns for spending money, or a million other things that get saved or trashed every day.
If you're serious about the problem, then it's not a technical hurdle. Data storage is cheap. Emulators are good. Batch document conversion is possible. The problem, if you're willing to call it that is that the benefit has to outweigh the cost. Lowering the cost of data preservation only increases the cost of data searching and real information retrieval. And very quickly it becomes a philosophical argument about the value of preserving irrelevant knowledge in a world that has moved on. Yet the argument is couched in terms of data storage and manipulation which is really the tiniest corner of the issue.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
heh, if they look in my attic they will find a bunch of cd's, but they'll also find a bunch of computers that can read them ;)
It's not something new. There are lots of projects around the world trying to solve it. As with all issues of preserving knowledge, you'll find that even the simplest things can turn to great pains. For instance - you have your great hole in the mountain for storage of nuclear waste. Now, you don't want people in the future walking down there. Assuming they dont speak your language, what do you do? Paint something, like pic 1: human outside, pic 2: human going in, pic 3: human dead. Sounds good eh? Try reading it backwards, as some cultures do. Human dead, goes inside, comes out alive? Not really the same thing, but it's an interesting problem. What will we leave behind? Not many things are written in rock any more.
All this makes me think of Stanislav Lem's "Memoires found in a bathtub", which is a grat book for those of you who haven't read it.
This is already happening with analog recordings. The Piano Paper that you put into a piano and the piano plays the music. The old drums that were originally used to record sound. Records (45s, 33s, 78s), 8 Track Tape, Reel-to-Reel, dictaphone, Cassettes (becoming this way).
Want picture/video? My father has some negatives that are 3 inches by 5 inches. Back before the days of 35mm film. Then there are those old home movies that predate VHS.
The only difference between that and digital is that digital is newer.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The way I see it is, in 2045, they'll have computers powerful enough to look at any binary data and accurately assess what the data represents, and how to extract any useful information from it.
This is a pretty good point.
If you're thinking that your data will be carried forward electronically, then there's no reason why a set of specifications or source code in a commonly-understood language (I can't imagine that any reasonable programmer of the future wouldn't be able to at least puzzle out some well-commented Pascal or C) showing how to decode your data. However, you'd have to hope that whoever is 'carrying forward' your data isn't lazy or cheap, because this would be the kind of thing that would get cut off or removed for being redundant if you started running short on storage space. It would be unfortunate, but not hard to believe, if some space-consious bureaucrat somewhere were to keep only the data and not any of the sample decoders, especially if it was in a repository with a lot of other people's data, and each one had its own set of example decoders. I guess the decision of whether to trust the archivists in question would vary with each situation.
In the case of physical media, I think it's important to bundle each set of data-containing artifacts with either an actual reader device which produces some kind of easily understood output, or schematics for same. For instance if you were going to bury a vault of CD-Rom type discs, it would make sense to put at least a CD-Rom drive in (actually in a vault, you might as well put a whole computer in too). In something smaller, at least include a decoder schematic, or at least some kind of minimal diagram. I'm thinking the bare minimum would be something like what NASA put on the top side of the Voyager probes' "Golden Records."
Actually if you want a good example of a data-storage 'time capsule,' I think the Golden Records pretty much are the 'best practice.' Engraved into metal, built to last practically forever, each one comes with a cartridge and some minimal schematic instructions. If I'm not mistaken too, the very beginning of the recording is a triangle-wave test tone, which is represented on the front, so you know you've gotten it right. I've also read that they included analog slow-scan TV images on there too, although how they expected people to puzzle those out I don't know.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And don't even think about it if this is in a post-technological or post-apocalyptic scenario. That's when you want hardcopy! Old-fashioned printouts and photographs... with all their attendant preservation headaches. That should be in the bunker too.
Writing software or even reverse engineering formats looks much easier by comparison.
you had me at #!
I agree. But there should be something available to store stuff that's not quite important enough by itself to warrant printing out, but might be worth storing anyway.
Also, there are those things which gain importance by being a complete record. For example (and this is a weak example, I admit) take all my email. It's far too much to print out, and it wouldn't be worth the paper anyway. However, that's not to say it's unimportant: if I could keep a complete record of every email I ever wrote, for my entire life, that repository in toto could be important or worthwhile. It's important though only because it's a complete record, and useful really only if it's searchable and indexed (or sorted). Very few messages are by themselves important, but it would be neat to have the ability 30 years from now to go through and see what was on my mind, at any given point in time.
For things like this, you really need a storage medium that's both random access and supports a high data density. To go with that, it's probably acceptable for it to have a shorter lifespan than the "time capsule" applications.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...they will find a bunch of cd's, but they'll also find a bunch of computers that can read them...
I'm pretty sure the computer's broke or something. I tried plugging the computer into a regular hydrogen outlet and the hydrogen receptacle claimed in a very insistent voice that device didn't meet code for an approved hydrogen appliance. I figured I was Foobar.
Then, I remembered a story about how energy used to be distributed. After extensive research, I sucessfully built a 120 volt sine wave generator, plugged the computer in, and spoke into the mouse. Guess what? The computer didn't say a thing back.
Still more research made it clear that sound would come from the silver platter things. I held one tight against my ear when I spoke into the mouse...still nothing.
After still more research, I connected the big vacuum tube thingy (which also runs on 120 volt sine waves) to the computer. After a few microblicks, I saw some strange white symbols glowing on the surface. It that looked like this "C: Drive Error: No Bootable Device."
BR> Now where getting somewhere. I'm sure the pattern of glowing dots is tightly compressed data being shown on the screen. I've got a pattern recognition expert looking at the pattern of glowing dots on the screen. It's probably some sort of ancient code.
Yesterday, someone said that feelings of surprise, anxiety and disbelief was represented by a glowing pattern of dots that looked like this =:O
While file formats and media have presented a problem, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that digital information has an extended lifetime, and the most valuable information will be converted into newer formats as well as more simple and fundamental formats. Simple formats like ASCII text have handled the test of time. I'm more concerned by the potential lockdown of information through overzealous use of DRM technology backed by overbroad intellectual property laws. Just like the last dark age, the next one will be the result of people trying to control other people.
-- $G
Dateline: February, 1890
New "photographs" may be useless for archival purposes
Scientiests say that the dyes used in so-called "cameras" may not provide the kind of lasting record that traditional stone tablets have provided. In fact, left in bright sunlight for 50 years or more, photographs may be completely unreadable by even the latest 1890 technology.
This will surely mean the demise of modern civilization, since future generations are very unlikely to care enough about the past to devote any energy at all into preservation and reclamation of older information. Anything that can't be read by 1900 is likely to be lost forever.
It's yet another sad commentary on the state of modern civilization, and one more reason why manufacturers of stone tablets and chisels shouldn't throw into the towel too soon.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
copy it from one media format to the next BEFORE the old one dissapears or keep your data on your hard drives and copy it to your new ones each time you upgrade.
Low capacity removable media like floppies and to some extent CDs is the enemy of data preservation because it makes the job of copying stuff to fresh media require far more human labour.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register