Most Digital Content Not Stable

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @04:55AM from the define-stable dept.

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?"

1 of 353 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

They could try harder by Waffle+Iron · 2007-03-20 05:04 · Score: 4, Interesting

The CD wouldn't play with an off-the-shelf CD player. That doesn't mean that a special "archaeological" CD player can't be built that would perform extensive microscopic image analysis of the disk surface in order to read the data in the face of extensive corruption.
Some analog technologies, like old color films, have also degraded and need image enhancement to recover the original content.