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Archiving Digital Data an Unsolved Problem
mattnyc99 writes, "It's a huge challenge: how to store digital files so future generations can access them, from engineering plans to family photos. The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of readability down the line. And as technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?" From the article: "[US national archivist] Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that preserves any type of document — created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media — for as long as the United States remains a republic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a government research lab about his mission, the man replied, 'Your problem is so big, it's probably stupid to try and solve it.'"
than the previous ages where all information was kept on paper or in spoken words? The problem isn't so much how to invent something that will always be readable, but some way to always have the applications to read it. If it were not for the Rosetta Stone, much of what we know about the ancient world might still be a mystery.
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There are only two ways of doing this: keeping a copy of every program used to create these files (and a system to run them on) or converting them to some open and well-supported format.
For text documents, HTML is probably the best bet. It is so widely used and supported readers are almost garunteed to exist as long as computers do in their current form. (And if something ever truely supersedes it, a mass-conversion program will be written anyway.) HTML probably works for basic spreadsheets too. Graphics support for GIF, JPEG, and PNG is probably at that level as well, and MP3 for music.
As a bonus, most of the native programs for the documents to be preserved have translators to these formats already.
Beyond that I have no idea.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
From TSA: "Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?"
Obviously not; Popular Mechanics itself has preserved much of the era in traditional hardcopy formats, making it no less lossy than previous printed-word eras.
Of course, understanding the era from such incomplete and unreliable records will be a challenge to archaeologists and historians; again, not much different from previous eras.
In conclusion: doesn't matter, hardly news.
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Things like music, TV shows, movies, literature, toys, magazines etc are all cultural products. For future generations we need to keep records of there items as much as family trees, great stories, buldings, etc.
;)
Besides, who's to decide what is 'crap' or not. It might be that to the untrained eye, a clay pot from Egypt might not look interesting. The color, shape, its condition, etc might tell someone who used it, why, what cultural value (symbology, usefullness, etc) the pot actually had. And culture evolves from culture. Keeping a record of everything we product allows future generations to inform themselves of who we were and what we did. Quality of the information itself is really unimportant.
Only thing I'd have to add: I wish future generations all the luck in sorting through our garbage piles and recycling/salvaging what they can. If anything, this amount of waste - or crap - is a record of us as much as anything. I can agree with you on this point about crap in our culture!!!
It really isn't a question WHETHER we will be able to read old digital data in the future. After all, humans invented these formats, flawed as they may be, and humans can decipher them with enough effort. We can crack cryptography -- a deliberate attempt to make it as difficult as possible to decipher certain information. So it's hard to imagine any data format that could not be deciphered in the future with some honest effort.
Instead it is a question of whether the data is WORTH the effort. From an anthropological standpoint, this is valuable historical data, and its value is not decreased by our inability to interpret it. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied even if we don't know what it means. It will not erode or decay like other historical artifacts, if we put in the small effort required to preserve it. Assuming humanity doesn't self-destruct, there will be plenty of time in the future for historians to decipher and interpret the data when a need arises for it.
Expanding copyright protection to a term equal to two lifetimes means that now even some of the good stuff is being lost because it is not allowed to preserve it.
If preservation is outlawed, only outlaws will be preservationists.
I believe Ray Bradbury had something to say on this subject.
KFG
I've been wondering, with our global nature now, will we need archeologists in the future? While I believe cililiziations will surely 'collapse', won't we all be around to immediately take note of it, and update Wikepedia? Seriously, I don't think we're going to be digging for stuff from this time, the global nature of our society leads me to that conclusion. It's not like when Greek society fell.
the trick is... hoping that in a hundred thousand years people still care at all about their past. The slow realization as I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga about the origins of the Galactic Empire chilled me, mostly because the people of the empire had become so numb to their past as to have made it vanish entirely.
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I believe Ray Bradbury had something to say on this subject.
Perhaps more ironic -- it's a pretty good bet that whatever he wrote on the subject, it's not available online due to copyright restrictions imposed by his publisher or "estate."
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I ask: has this ever happened before?
Not necessarily in electronic bits and bytes. Not the "Alexandria Library" that was mostly duplicated in other libraries or private collections. Maybe like the Inca quipu, mats of knotted strings that recorded all their empire's operational records, other than the ceremonial records in statues and murals. But some quipu survive, despite Spaniards destroying most of them in the mid-1500s. Enough that we can at least recognize that they did have records of lots of transactions.
No, something more transient, as transient as our bits, read/written by something more transient than our metal/plastic/glass machines. Maybe songs or other performed stories, like tribal Australians. Maybe woven in more degradable material, like uncured plant matter. Maybe both, like the Pacific star navigation lore taught in temporary woven stics, but carried in the mind. Maybe patterns in some other loseable medium, like animal pelt patterns no longer readable now that the code has been lost, or interbred back into "blankness".
If it can happen to us, it could have happened before. Our civilization rose from meager beginnings only about 12K years ago, after the last Ice Age that lasted about 12Ky. There was another one before that, with people accumulating knowledge between. And probably a half-dozen or so others since we became as genetically developed as we are today, between 7Mya and 200Kya. We don't even have many records from the first half of the last 12Ky. Could we be reinventing the wheel, literally, every 25 thousand years?
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Yep. Microsoft's commitment to their "Plays for Sure" campaign with the Zune really instills confidence in their backwards compatability.
At least with OpenOffice I can legally archive the source code and install images needed to access the data for that period (say, every year or six months.) Sort of like dropping a copy of TrueCrypt on a DVD full of crypto archives.
With the new DRM keys and license enforcement policies, I dread someday trying to resurrect an old image so I can access data archives, only to find it wants to register with a DRM verification service that no longer runs or is no longer compatible with a 4-5 year old install image.
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