Slashdot Mirror
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.
Stone tablets. Just drill a hole for a zero and your away and laughing :)
Now we just need a large enough area to store them
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
At the enterprise level we use 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy drives in an elaborate redundant array. It consists of roughly 70,000 Disks, each changed nightly. We haven't had any problems yet. Hopefully the rest of the world will play catch up soon.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
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.
Just because it's harder to recover the data doesn't mean it's impossible.
Of course, anyone using CDs or DVDs for large data backup must have a lot of interns to do the disc swapping.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Some analog technologies, like old color films, have also degraded and need image enhancement to recover the original content.
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.
Have people already forgotten the advantage of digital? If you have an analog tape, every time you make a copy of it, the quality will be degraded. But with digital, you can make a million copies and the final copy will be the byte by byte equivilent of the original. So what if CDs only last 10 years before becoming unusable? You can make another copy! So what if this guy wouldn't have been able to recover after physical damage to his media....if it was important, he should have had digital offsite backups! And those backups would have been 100% equivelent to the originals.
Qxe4
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
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."