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.'"

Comments

How is this different

[zappepcs]

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.

Re:How is this different

[ThosLives]

It's not so much the Rosetta stone, but the fact that a "Rosetta stone" has a built-in context - it's obviously communication or artwork of some kind. If you have a big pile of digital data, what is it? An image? Compressed text? Audio? Just a sequence of numbers? The thing "printed" information gives you is that the presentation of the data gives you an idea of what it is - we don't yet have any digital data formats for which the presentation of the data gives an idea of the content; in fact, most digital storage mechanisms present all types of information in identical manner.

That's the real challenge - devising a digital storage format in which presentation can be used to apply context to the data.

Re:How is this different

[toddestan]

You're assuming far too much. Remember, there are entire written langauges from 2000+ years ago that we barely know how to read. And we have the context of what they were written on, formatting, what the characters look like and things like that. Now, in 2000 years, if someone came upon your harddrive, or flash memory card, or whatever - assuming they could even read it, they aren't going to be able to pop it into a computer and see c:\My Music\ and C:\Documents and Settings\, and the only challenge left is to figure out what the hell an OGG file is. They aren't going to see files. They are going to see 1's and 0's. Lots of them - billions on a memory card and trillions on a harddrive. They won't have a clue know how to interpet the file system, even for something relatively simple like FAT16. They may not even know that a byte is 8 bits. They won't have context, they will be baffled by the fact that most every OS writes files in fragments all over the drive. They likely won't even be tell areas that were marked as deleted but not wiped from the actual data, let along figure out what the swap file is. I seriously doubt that someone in the future, given a working harddisk but nothing else to go on, would be able to pull anything meaningful from the drive. Heck, look at modern day examples - how long did it take Linux to be able to read and write to NTFS, given the number of very smart people working on it who already had a pretty good idea how it functioned?

Open, well-used, file formats.

[Daniel_Staal]

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.

It's whether it's WORTH it

[pclminion]

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.

Re:I've heard this problem over and over

[kfg]

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

Re:Not too long...

[thelost]

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.

Extra irony points.

[Kadin2048]

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."