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Most Digital Content Not Stable
brunes69 writes "The CBC is running an article profiling the problems with archiving digital data in New Brunswick's provincial archives. Quote from the story: 'I've had audio tape come into the archives, for example, that had been submerged in water in floods and the tape was so swollen it went off the reel, and yet we were able to recover that. We were able to take that off and dry it out and play it back. If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted'. Given the difficulties with preserving digital data, is it really the medium we should be using for archival purposes?"
That content can not be preserved at all. We'll be a civilization without written history, like American Indians.
Isn't that the point of digital? Lossless copies are possible (depending on format obviously). Why have one plastic cylinder that can be lost when you can have it in 5 or 10 locations?
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Ridiculous. It's not the fact that content is digital, it's the fact that the media being used to store the information (CDs etc) is fragile. If these mythical audio tapes had been digital tapes, recovering the signal from them would have been just as easy.
... wasn't *exactly* what you put on. You have the appearance of stability, that you can retrieve something off a damaged tape, but the truth is something different. That's the beauty of analogue. The same simplicity and fault-tolerance of the format also means the format will naturally degrade over time. The contents may be retrievable, but they've degraded, and as such are not the same contents as when first written. Digital fails, but when it doesn't fail, you have exactly the same content as you did when you started. Archivists will not run from digital - their techniques will improve instead. or something.
Yes, analog tape is durable. But let's take it and that "CD" and put them in front of a large electromagnet and see how each fares.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't know what it is with /. but it seems this kind of infopocalypse story comes up at least once every 6 months in regards to digital data. I can only think one thing in each case: This is fucking retarded.
As you said, the great thing about digital data is that is can be replaced cheaply, perfectly, and spread around. It's resilience isn't in the one copy lasting 1000 years, it is in having copies everywhere, so no even short of nuclear war can eliminate them all, and maybe not even then.
This also is the response to the other big cry-wolf thing, "What happens when the data is in a format that's too old???!!11one" The answer is we just keep copying it to new formats. I have digital copies of papers that I wrote in high school. They were written on an old copy or Works for Windows 3.1 and usually saved to floppy. I don't have a floppy any more but it isn't a problem. I long ago transferred them to a harddrive and I just keep transferring them to new drives when I get them. I also periodically load the old documents in to whatever my current word processor is, convert them, and re-save them as a new format.
So the parent is completely correct. Because of digital's ability to be perfectly copied, and especially with the Internet's ability to distribute those copies to anywhere in the world, it can have a permanence far above and beyond analogue. The individual copies might be fragile, but get a few thousand, or million of them and you'll be hard pressed to get rid of them all.
If a CD had been submerged in water, it would've been fine. There's no point in making the comparison if it wouldn't have been damaged in the first place. They need to find a better example.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Rather glib, but a very important point. The biggest problem is data density. The higher the data density, the less damage it takes to destroy it. The other upside to digital data is the ability to build in fault tolerance. CDs, for example, are fault tolerant. They can accomodate a certain number of scratches and bad blocks and still produce 100% accurate output. On the other hand, this tolerance comes at the expense of (wait for it) data density. The upside to analog data, is that damage distorts without destroying.
There is much that has already been documented and guidelines exist to guarantee somehow the short to medium-term preservation of digital assets; this particular link is for audio-related digital assets, but data is all the same...!
A combination of multiple sets of magneto-optical and tape backups maintained in separate locations, all temperature and humidity-controlled environments should easily yield 25~30 years shelf life, which guarantees that by then we'll hopefully have found better long-term options to transfer these to.
I am transferring most of my 15 to 20-year old audio DAT tapes digitally with no problems. Good brand-name CD-R's (like Tayo-Yuden) kept out of the light and at a steady temperature seem fairly resilient so far, but there has been batches which over time have developed 'rot' or layer oxydation, which sometimes renders them partially or wholly unusable.
DLT tapes are so far the most trouble-free type of media I have encountered, but with only 10 years to go back on, not sure that is accurate.
Z.
This also is the response to the other big cry-wolf thing, "What happens when the data is in a format that's too old???!!11one" The answer is we just keep copying it to new formats. I have digital copies of papers that I wrote in high school. They were written on an old copy or Works for Windows 3.1 and usually saved to floppy. I don't have a floppy any more but it isn't a problem. I long ago transferred them to a harddrive and I just keep transferring them to new drives when I get them. I also periodically load the old documents in to whatever my current word processor is, convert them, and re-save them as a new format.
I think you're missing an important element here. As you move along in time, the volume of data that must be converted to the format du jour only gets bigger and bigger.
For a single person, it's probably not too bad. I, too, have pretty much everything I ever wrote since I first got a computer, and every few years I've committed to rolling the whole thing onto new media. So I've gone from offline backups on floppies, to Zip disks (in retrospect a mistake), to CDs, to DVD-R, and now to DVD+R (the -R discs were crappy and I've since heard that +R is a superior format anyway). This isn't much trouble, because the amount of data I have to backup hasn't really grown that much faster than the data density of available media. I'm probably up to a couple of DVDs for the stuff I really, really care about, maybe a binder if I include all the photos and video.
But what's a basic Saturday-afternoon copy-and-burn job for an individual is a Sisyphean task for a large government agency or library, particularly one who is constantly generating new content. I've seen places that could barely keep up with archiving the stuff they were producing, much less roll their vast archives forward onto new media. So they'd have vaults of hard drives, sitting next to DLT cassettes, next to IBM 3480, next to racks of old half-inch open-reel tapes. Probably back in some dark corner there were piles of punched cards; it really wouldn't surprise me. The problem of data loss due to unreadable formats isn't some abstract 'maybe,' it's already happened in a lot of places (but nobody really wants to talk about it, so it mostly gets buried and whatever's on the tapes gets written off).
The reason why there's so much interest in preservable formats is because while it may not be strictly impossible to constantly roll old backups and archives forward, it's very hard, and requires vast amounts of effort and expense. If you have a backup that's being written into a format that you know is going to be readable for a long time, even if it's more expensive to write initially, you can save a lot of money and time down the road by not having to copy it forward as often.
People may get a little shrill when they're talking about these issues, but they're quite real.
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What are you talking about? backup tapes are digital bits represented as analog signals xfer'd onto a magnetic tape. So when you read the analog signal back it transforms given the signal into a digital bit. To make a copy of a DLT tape it will get converted back to digital-copied-xfer'd to tape exactly as the original.. you can copy this backup media millions of times without loss of bits... you must be thinking of plain old audio analog tapes where every analog-analog copy got worse.. really if what you are saying is true, backup tapes would be pretty useless.. dont know how you got modded +4 informative
Chappies in New Brunswick:
From an earlier /. article:
Quick someone tell the author of: 'So You've Lost a $38 Billion File' that everything is alright! New Brunswick had data that was submerged in water, tape so swollen it was off the reel; they still managed to recover it.
And don't come out with that: 'Polar Bear ate the backup tape' excuse again!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
The tragedy of what was done to the Native Americans isn't that Europeans came in and conquered them. It's the way they were treated afterwards. I don't think anyone can read about the Trail of Tears and not feel something. You can't confuse war with murder. There is a difference.
That being said. What's done is done. It should be remembered so we learn from those horrible mistakes. It shouldn't be a constant source of guilt to be used against people that had no part in it. The same goes for slavery, genocide and all the other ignorant suffering we've inflicted on each other.
The European invasion of North America hardly constitutes a genocide. The sole purpose was not to eradicate a race, but to destroy the fabric of the culture and remove them from the land. I do believe I have friends that have some native american ancestry... The only difference is that it happened in a modern era, and the conquered people were allowed to retain some continuity. People act as if the inhuman treatment that befell the natives was in some way out of the ordinary for human nature. You can not compare the destruction of the Native Americans to Rome conquering Greece. Greece was a well developed empire that fell to another and was absorbed. There was technology and racial similarities that promoted integration. By comparison, the native people of North America had no such technology, literature, and had no relationship with the Europeans. In the beginning people negotiated, but the problem is that negotiations are a farce, and they only matter if neither side has an advantage. In the case of the Native Americans, they never really had a choice, and the some of them knew it. They had absolutely no chance against European powers simply because of the lacking of technology and cultural cohesion. One thing that people forget is that the idea of a superior people has been around forever and still continues. It is part of the human psyche and almost every major religion in the world. Don't think of it so much as a racial superiority, but rather religious. This is very much what is going on in the middle east and why they can't have peace. The religions of the region believe they are chosen to possess the holy land, and they can't let the sub humans have it. This has happened throughout all of history to ever race in the world (even among the same peoples)... just this one was more well documented.
The European invasion of North America hardly constitutes a genocide.
That's a pretty fine hair to split between genocide and ethnic cleansing. What is the real difference between successful ethnic cleansing and unsuccessful genocide?
I do believe I have friends that have some native american ancestry...
All this means is that the genocide was not complete.
The Nazis attempted a genocide against the Jews but did not complete the job. If they had started out simply with a mission of ethnic cleansing and achieved the same result would it have been a better thing?
As to why you're not using TiVO (or similar stunningly brilliant Digital Video Recorder technology) I'll never know ... :)
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