Slashdot Mirror
Researcher Warns of "Digital Dark Age"
alphadogg writes "A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"
And who needs to store pictures and movies on their computers anyway? In fact, I think the world would be a better place without them!
Now if you excuse me, I'm going back to watching Iron Man on my wrist watch.
We can just store everything in the cloud! Problem solved!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
It's only because people are so anal these days. Who gives a shit? It's not like anyone in the future's going to miss anything. Even today with items like the Rosetta stone it's not worth much more than a Trivial Pursuit question - we'd not be any more educated or intelligent if stuff from 2000 years ago hadn't gone missing. Sure, there's a certain entertainment value in it all, but the idea that in 2000 years time anyone's going to be remotely bothered about the loss of websites, games and so on from the late 20th century is just ridiculous.
"I often ask, 'Everyone in the audience who thinks they're going to be using the same word processor in ten years, raise your hand.' No hands go up. 'Everyone who has data around that's going to have value in ten years?' After a minute's thought, every hand goes up. The lesson is clear: information outlives technology."
- Tim Bray
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
The cultural loss isn't something that should be overlooked, some can bemoan it but the value of culture is that it exists, and that different ones existed in the past. Culture changes from moment to moment but without some action the real meat of the early 21st century will be lost forever. That is the big thing here, and that is justification for working for truly readable digital archival methods. There is a project of making minisuce indentations, but that requires a lot of technology to see much less decode. Continuous duplication, by transfer of all old data across all mediums as they rise and fall, by printing content and storing it in climate regulated warehouses, etc. We relish seeing things from thousands of years ago. This is humanity, that is our legacy. We need to leave a legacy for our grandchildren.
The only motivation for a company to invent new ways to preserve data long term is to provide it as a service so they can profit from it. Other than that, a companies main goals are deleting everything it legally can. Anything that no longer exists can't result in a lawsuit.
Everything that is preserved is a potential liability. For items requiring indefinite retention because they are critical to the business... They will be stored, redundant, and backed up appropriately. As the systems that provide those qualities age, they will be replaced in regular maintenance and upgrade schedules as economics and timing come together in the right proportions. In that way, reliability and long-term survivability are maintained - nothing stays on ancient systems that are unmaintainable forever. When systems go out of support, everybody has already been looking to the next solution to migrate to.
So what's wrong with this approach? Its essentially what all "big" companies are currently doing. I don't believe in this proprietary format FUD either - if the proprietary format is no longer supported, you migrate. Potential of future cost to migrate is the only concern, not survivability.
Migration is todays solution to long term storage and I see no reason it should be ignored. Like security, data retention is an ongoing objective that requires maintenance - its not some end-state. Dreaming of a solution that will just last forever seems archaic, no?
Overclockers
OPEN file formats and OPEN hardware, well documented.
Even if no program exists anymore to read your data, as long as you have the specs you can rebuild it. And I mean hard- AND software. If you know how to build it, you can build it provided you have the means. And I'm pretty confident that our future cousins will be able to build a current computer with their future technology, as long as they know WHAT they should build.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
*********DOR!
Well at least that's all we got out of the Word files describing the beast.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Most of the text in most word processing documents are easily available to be parsed out even without the specs. The formatting would be lost, as would any embedded objects or images.
Open formats would improve it, but I would be more concerned about encrypted documents and media loss than not being able to recover data (text/images/video/music/etc) from available files. There are a lot of clever people that can do amazing things with deciphering proprietary formats.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Amazing as it sounds, I still have very VERY old data that goes as far back as 7th grade when I started using computers. I know of no converter for Professional Write that will convert Professional Write documents into ODF, or even MS Word 97/2000/2003.
The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.
From the article -
âoeIf we canâ(TM)t keep todayâ(TM)s information alive for future generations,â McDonough said, âoewe will lose a lot of our culture.â
Hardly.
Apparently none of our culture is stored in books anymore?
Sure if every piece of data was wiped out the world would lose a lot of information... but a lot of valuable and useful information is still put on paper. I don't think that is our biggest cause for concern.
However I do agree that the world really needs to agree on more open / non-proprietary ways of storing data. Sure, I can open a .wav of Blackadder talking about 'sticking a Christmas tree' somewhere from 1992, but I have a bit of trouble opening .ra (real audio) video files from a few years ago.
And working in government everywhere I go the electronics file storage is just a discordant mess. Anything important we have to print and store hardcopies because our electronic systems are just unreliable.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Windows 3.1 floppies totally draw all the girls.
If archeologists find knives and trash to be important in a search, I'd say the average pictures that we are taking today might actually be very intereting to future generations for they represent normal life.
Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says
The way I see it there are two approaches to the problem. The Quixotic fight consisting in changing the world and forcing in a dictatorship of openness regarding file formats, which doesn't solve the problem for the past 50 years of computer history.
Or let a few hundred people around the world worry about file format parsing or, in the worst case, even emulators to do whatever old computers did. In a hundred years from now, you'll have very complete emulators for our modern PCs. Considered that a 1994 PC is quite comparable to a 2008 PC (and presumably a 2015 PC) from an emulation point of view, you know that's a given, and even then, in case there was no such emulator, you know you could find a good such emulator for machines from the 2040s, which themselves would be well emulated by machines from the 2070s, and so on.. that's what we already do. There's hardly any program you used 20 or 30 years ago that you couldn't use today.
You just got troll'd!
Most of the garbage that we have now just isn't worth keeping. The biggest problem is filtering out the junk we have so that we know what is really valuable. That would be things like great music; writing; the origins of software freedom; works of history and biography etc. Then we could store that, but the problem is we mostly store SOX inspired lies for compliance audits. This garbage takes away from any effort to store serious stuff long term. Who could we trust to do the filtering? The govt? (no please don't answer that :-)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Words: 50 Swears: 9 Facts: 1 (It's an open standard) Relevant Points: 0 You're a little light on the swears section for typical interweb poasts.
...the more they stay the same. Here's something I posted back in 2006 about this same issue: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207582&cid=16922754
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Historically, things that have been very uninteresting at the time, have been hugely valuable to researchers later on. We may not care about the countless people talking "crap" on bebo right now, but in a few hundred years it might be a different story. When people can easily analyse all those posts for meaningful psychological profiles that aren't currently understood never mind modelled and easily detected, all of that could tell a lot about our society. Even rubbish tips from thousands of years ago are hugely valuable to paleontologists.
This goes more so, for important government records, etc. Peter Quinn did a great job of explaining that, with his Sovereignty talk.
Recently at work we ran into a problem where a "knowledge management" package died. The company had gone belly up and there is no converter. We are printing and re-typing in thousands of pages because there is just no other way.
I collect antiquarian books. Funny that a collection of plays printed up in Latin in 1542 only require the learning of a language, yet a knowledge base less then 10 years old is unreadable...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
In mspaint, yeah
Government agencies and archivists are starting to wake up to the fact that this is an issue -- I think the Office 2007 file format change was a big factor that is getting it on the radar.
Minnesota, California, Massachusetts and New York definitely have people studying the issue. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers when it comes to these things.
In my opinion -- which is not necessarily the opinion of my employer -- one of the major problems is that there are far too many records being preserved.
If you looked at the archives of a government or corporate office 30 years ago, only official memorandums, some meeting minutes and policies were retained. Today, technology like email has improved communication somewhat, but has also encouraged sloppy office practices so that it is nearly impossible to figure out what is useful and what isn't.
To compound matters, the courts are now mandating document retention and email archiving which encourages the retention of even the most banal communication.
IMO, the period 1990-2020 will be a black hole in history.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The article talks about two very distinct and different problems--hardware and file formats. The author has a point about the hardware--if the media goes bad or if there is no way to read the data, then the data is lost. However, the author is completely off-base when it comes to file formats...
The author specifically mentions WordPerfect files. Bad example! The default file format in Wordperfect X4 (released in April, 2008) is the same as what was used in WordPerfect 6--which came out in 1993 (DOS and Windows). While I can't speak for OpenOffice or Google Docs, MS-Word can read those files (and WordPerfect 5.x files) with a simple File/Open. Excel opens Lotus 1-2-3 files as well. So, Word can open popular formats in use since 1988 (WP 5.0) and Excel can open some formats in use since 1983 (1-2-3 r1a). You can also buy programs like FileMerlin to convert old documents.
Frankly, when it comes to file formats, conversion apps will exist for a LONG time. For DOS apps, you could even go so far as to create a v/m or use Dosbox, load up your obsolete word processor (I miss "Leading Edge Word Processor"!) and copy/paste the text into Word or Notepad...
Image files, sounds, & videos are no exception... GIF has been around since 1987, JPEG has been around since the early '90s (opening those on a 10Mhz 8088 was slow!), and MPEG/WMV/AVI/Quicktime videos are easily openable...
Finally, the more people that are affected by obsolete files, the more interest there is in some way to convert the data... But don't forget that a LOT of the data is junk--do you really care about your 7th grade paper you wrote on Hong Kong in 1989?
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Make copyright last 5 years. Then everything worthwhile will be backed up by someone who cares about it.
Everyone here seems to be missing the point -- Businesses don't need help preserving data. Anything that's really valuable and needs to be preserved will eventually be put on a laptop and lost in an airport. But what about your wedding photos? What about that book you've worked for three years on, and saved it in word doc format?
The problem of data preservation is not one business needs to address -- there's a million geeks (hi slashdot) that will be eager to earn their pay coming up with washing-machine sized solutions for business, in black cases with a stylish logo on the front. But what about me -- the person who makes less than $30k a year, keeps all my files on a laptop and an external drive, and doesn't have a lot of cash?
Let's say I want to put it in a safety deposit box and forget about it for 10 years? 20? 50? What are my options for preserving photos, videos, and text cheaply? And by cheaply, let me say less than a grand, since "cheap" seems to be relative here.
My father (dead, retired 20 years ago as a curator of a technology museum), was bothered as were others in the field, back in the 80's. He had seen microfiche come and go, apart from the *new* digital stuff that was already being junked. He was relying on high quality long term photographs in nitrogen canisters. It only worked because he was storing a visual media such as a sheets of paper. Only the important ones, but about a million of them existed.
.mic image format. I have a few files still of those on my computer. You can see what the picture is if you thumbnail it. But when you try to get a full sized image, Windows says it cannot recognize the file format. It is now a .mock format. Is there a term for operating systems no longer being able to recognize their own past? 'Osheimers' for example.
As for Wordperfect and floppy disks: yep. That's a problem in our home. We are having to migrate WP files now and then. It is not sufficient to have old computers that run the programs. I had WP on my computer (but didn't use it.) A series of glitches when upgrading to SP3 had as a side effect the corruption of WP on my computer. Whatever the problem was, I could not even re-install it. We are now down to one computer that can read it.
I, when I worked in IT, migrated library data. Getting it into any sort of readable text form was a trial. We have even been sent old Macintosh computers in the hope that we could get stuff off them. Usually we could, but it wasn't been done economically, and I cursed the Education system that had highly paid administrators who did not even dimly consider that a data storage system had a finite lifetime. Not even 20 years after my father retired on under half their salary.
The core solution is as the original article says - for all government software, mandate that data export to a widely used open standard be available within the package at no extra charge. I do not know of any impediment to this worth considering. Where there are privacy issues, it is simply exported encrypted and funds are established that allow a few facilities to decrypt and migrate the data. If you cannot sell to government, including any educators, then you are marginal. OK, so some games will be unavailable to future generations. That is inevitable. But then that will be a reason to collect and maintain the hardware if you are a hobbyist.
As for large corporations, it may be sufficient that the auditors require that data be accessible for forensic and liquidation purposes. That is, not readily, but if need be in extreme circumstance.
In short, the immediate solution is an administrative one. Software and hardware is the relatively easy bit.
My own prize example of a dead data format - the Windows
There is no license required to build and sell a a CD player. There IS a licence required if you want to CALL your optical disk reader a "CD player."
And you can still do this. The LG BH100 combination BluRay and HD-DVD player (I had one) couldn't display the HD-DVD logo because it didn't meet all the requirements of the HD-DVD player licensing. But it could still play HD-DVD movies just fine.
This is one of those fairly bogus, highly overblown stories that keeps cropping up every so often. A similar one is the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, which has never existed, and is always supposed to be coming Real Soon Now; in fact, the data to support this claim are always either nonexistent or wrong. (E.g., they compare Indian college graduates with US college graduates, but the Indian degree they're comparing with a U.S. bachelor's is more equivalent to an AA degree in the U.S.)
First off, the concern about incompatibility of physical media was valid 30 years ago, but it's a false analogy to try to apply it to today's situation. Thirty years ago, I had data on a mixture of 8-inch floppies and 9-track tapes. I can't read an 8-inch floppy anymore, and although 9-track tapes still exist, most 9-tracks from that era are no longer readable due to physical deterioration of the media. But that was all in an era when hard disks were expensive, and the internet didn't exist. Today, I have all my data on hard disks of various computers, and I use file synchronization software to keep them all in sync. If one of my hard disks dies, I replace it, and I haven't lost any of my data. (I also have backups on optical media, but I basically never need those.)
There's also the concern about formats. People tend to bring up, for example, the image of rooms full of physically deteriorating 9-track tapes with data from old NASA space probe missions. The formats are often not documented. The thing is, most of our data isn't at all analogous to the raw data from Mariner or Voyager or Viking. Those were unique historical events, and the only way to get more data like the data they collected is by sending another space probe. (People also tend to vastly overestimate the value of scientific raw data. It's extremely uncommon for raw data to be of interest decades later.)
Most of the world's data isn't in some obscure NASA format, it's stored in formats that are used by tons of people, and are extremely well documented. Sorry, but I just don't believe that the knowledge of how to decode Adobe Acrobat format is going to be lost to future generations. Ditto for html, jpeg, and mp3.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nowadays you can emulate old computers with excellent performance. For instance, my first home computer was a TRS-80. I can still run my old TRS-80 games on my linux box, using an emulator. Sure, emulation isn't perfect, and some information may be lost. But the claimed threat of data loss is vastly overblown.
The biggest threat to the preservation of information isn't technological change, it's copyright. The most likely reason that I wouldn't be able to get back an old piece of digital data is that the people who tried to preserve it and put it on the web got sued by the people who own the copyright -- the same people who let it go out of print. The economic incentives are to hold on to your copyrights (because that doesn't cost you any money) and send out DMCA notices to anyone who puts it on the net (because that doesn't cost you any money either), all in the hope that your content will be worth eleven cents fifty years from now. This is exactly what we see happening, for instance, with ROMs for old video games, which you can play in MAME, except that you have to find an illegal source for the data, because the owners of the copyrights aren't willing to sell you a copy.
Find free books.
Look, he's an Assistant Professor, not an Associate Professor. He just got his PhD a coupola years ago and somehow he managed to land a job. He needs to publish something, anything. He needs tenure. So he's saying the library (OK: 'Data' if you will) is on fire and we need a government rule to protect it. The librarians are going to nod wisely and agree with him (I'm a librarian and I've seen way too many wisely nodding librarians in my time.) It's all a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing and he'll be able to milk this for a few more articles to put on his c.v. He's whoring for points just like on /.
Meh?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
this means you have to bypass access keys or encryption
This is going to be a big problem. I have CAD files, code manuals and other engineering data that cannot be accessed with anything other than the proprietary CAD apps or browsing software. Some of these apps have been 'orphaned', in that the applicable versions are no longer supported by the vendors. Activation keys are locked to a particular machine, so trading in that Windows 98 machine for a nice new XP system is out of the question.
I make sure that none of my contracts oblige me to maintain electronic versions of deliverables or that any delivered to the clients will be accessible beyond the completion of the contract. Its rolls of blueprints or nothing.
Have gnu, will travel.
One of the UK's beer companies used to help sell their cans by having pictures of models on the side. At the time, it was just an beer can with a picture of a model, but now these pictures capture the fashions of the era, that would be hard for any designer to reproduce without having reference pictures ( 1980's.
Now these beer cans are actually collectors items.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
They're not printing this on paper, right?
Can't you print into a PDF and convert it to a TIFF with ImageMagick and give the OCR thingy that file?
Would go a lot faster, too...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
"Dark Age" is kind of an exaggeration. Presumably it's a reference to the period right after the Fall of Rome (475 AD) when most classical literature was lost because existing information technology (hand-transcription of documents) got too expensive for what passed for an economic system. This time around, if we lose much more, it's because we have a lot more to lose. But how much of it matters? If my USB drive dies and takes the last surviving copy of Debeee Does Dingos or the collected bloggings of Joey Joey, it's not that big a deal. But anything that really matters (the complete works of Shakespeare, the Beatles, the user's manual for Ultima IV) is going to be saved in multiple places in multiple formats, and it just not going to get lost.
I think the big problem is the exact opposite of what TFA warns about: too much preservation of stuff that isn't worth preserving and doesn't really represent our culture. Future generations wading through the digital crap we leave behind — blog rants, porn, advertising, spam, internet rumors, Star Trek flame wars and fan fiction — will be hard put to sift out our serious accomplishments.
Classical Greek civilization is probably the most influential in all of human history. And yet you can buy a single CD containing every single surviving work from the entire civilization! It's quality, not quantity, that defines a cultural heritage
My concern is how the components depicted on the schematic are going to be made out of rocks and nuts and berries, even if the schematic is readable.
There is a thick complex web of technologies needed to replicate said drive.
And I say this as somebody who has the complete Technical Reference information for the IBM PC. (that means I have the schematic diagram of the 10mb hard drive, and the schematic diagram of the hard disk controller, along with the source code for the BIOS extension on said controller)
I hacked into Carmen SanDiego and changed the character names to those of the staff of a school I was working at. // went into a time capsule around 1988. In 2013 it will be opened up.
The 5-1/2" floppy, formatted for an Apple
It'll be stuffed, just like the rest of the contents.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
If you wish for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren to have some shred of knowledge of your existence, you should make certain that you have black-and-white photographs taken and printed on the highest quality, assured permanence, stock that you can find. Those prints should be stored in a fashion that protects them from decay so that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren at least may see what their ancestors looked like. From personal experience, I would not have known what my parents and grandparents looked like when they were children had it not been for the relative permanence of the black-and-white printing process.
Sig this!
I do agree that we will see some 'cultural disintegration', but not for the reasons cited in the article (which I, of course did not read). The reasons? New media models that require "monthly access fees" (yes Blizzard, Sony, I'm looking at you), and DRM protected media. Sure, some companies will 'do the right thing' and open their media to the public once they are not actively using it as a revenue source, but they will be in the tiny minority. My kids will probably never be able to dust off the World of Warcraft DVD, insert it into their holo-reader and find out what our generation did for fun. Likewise with the millions of songs that are stored precariously on iPods throughout the world. Once the iPod breaks, and the iTunes servers are switched off for the last time, that music is lost forever to the people who loved it dearly, but were foolish enough to accept a 'limited rights' version of their media. Looking back, we can still enjoy art from the entire history of humanity - cave paintings, books, canvas and sheet music, just to name a few. Apart from the physical disintegration of the medium, little can destroy these expressions of our culture. With our new encoded, protected and limited DRM-riddled media, there will be very little to look back on from an individuals point of view. I expect that organizations will spring up to restore these lost works of art, and efforts will be made to make our current culture accessible in fifty or a hundred years. But where does that leave the young kid who finds the suitcase full of DVD's, or Blue-Ray discs in his attic, left to him by his grandfather? Will he or she be able to take a glimpse into history, in the way that our generation has been able to dust off the old vinyl record player, and reverently remove that piece of vinyl from its weathered cardboard cover, to listen to a crackly rendition of Muddy Water's 'Baby Please Don't Go' I doubt it.
Garbage isn't the problem.. the problem is that we have millions of copies of the same data. Think of the 50gb of video games you may have installed.. 10 million people have the same games as you. Music? Unless you performed it yourself or it's sub-underground, chances are millions of people each have multiple copies of it. The anime you've torrented has 10,000 downloads. .
No, see.. actually I'm just keeping a back up for the RIAA in case they lose their copy. PLus I keep it all transcoded to the next generation formats at no charge. And on top of that it's forward deployed for easy re-distribution without bottlenecking their servers. I even paythe lectric bill on the disks and internet connection. So copies are a good thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best example I can think of are personal letters. Usually we judge these by the importance of the person who wrote them, but in some cases we can (today) look at the letters written by ordinary people to their loved ones and gain great historical insight into the events of the time. Take, for example, Ken Burns' "The Civil War". Some of the most compelling information in the documentary was found in the letters written by ordinary soldiers.
Somehow I doubt we'll have records of the emails today's soldiers are sending home 150 years from now.
We can't judge what future generations are going to find valuable in the mountains of data we're generating today. We should find a way to preserve as much of it as we can. I hope someone is working on good, open compression algorithms to go along with the data storage.
"I didn't know you could do that! Why would anyone want to grow celery that way?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I'm more concerned about losing the culture from the 20th century.
Everyone born after 1975 hates the RIAA, doesn't pay any attention to whatever they say, and file-shares gigabytes without a thought to the music industry definition of 'piracy'. This is as it should be. It means that the music and movies of the (for now) young people is safe because it is widely circulated outside the control of those who have deluded themselves into believing that they own it.
It's all the stuff from the first 2/3rds of the 20th century that will disappear. Because the people who like it are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's now and don't have the technical skills to copy and distribute it. Plus they actually trust the corporations will preserve it. I mean all the books, music recordings, television shows, movies, and plays from the first half of the 20th century. The stuff that is under 'infinite copyright' and will never be in public domain because the corporations will simply pay off the politicians to endless extend the copyright period, as they do now.
As soon as all this stuff stops selling (and who nowdays is paying money for the book that was #3 on the New York Times BestSeller list of Oct 28, 1936?), and can't be legally copied because it can't enter public domain, then the corporations will just destroy it. Pulp the books; convert the film stock to ethanol to power their SUVs; dump the magazines in the oceans or in nuclear waste sites to absorb neutrons. When that happens, all this culture will be gone and historians 200 years from now will have little idea about how civilized people actually thought and acted in the critical early years of the modern technological age.
You can talk to the old people about the need to preserve their culture by making 'illegal' copies of the books, magazines, and movies that were important to them, but they are just simply and completely clueless about the extent that their culture will die as they do.
It's a Digital Supernova Age and they're bitching. Think of your parents' or grandparents' generation, and try figuring out how much information exists about them. Sure there's the basics like birth certificates, marriage certificates, property records and other big things, there's probably some pictures and maybe they're mentioned in some books but I doubt there's any real record of how their daily life was and what they were doing. I know I have chat logs and such from my youth that are probably way, way more accurate and uncensored records than anything my parents have, even if they kept a diary which they didn't. If I get over how immature I was at the time, that's easily something I could release for research in 50 years time. With blogs and myspace and twitter and facebook and whatnot you can do a lot more, in a lot more detail with pictures and whatnot today and capture a large part of that as it happens.
The only thing happening here is that a few historians look at all this trivia which was always there, but never in a form to be captured and go "We should preserve ALL of it!" in a historygasm. If you preserved 0.001% you'd still preserve more than any generation of humanity to date. It's a case of diminishing returns, we don't truly need 24/7 live footage of 8 billion people as an historical record. It's certainly important to catch some sample of daily life and not just the big historical events and mainstream media, but I have no doubt that more than enough of this will be preserved anyway. Maybe we're in deep shit if humanity nukes itself out of existance but otherwise I'm sure it'll be kept as collectables or antique information from hundreds of years ago. Can you imagine in 2544 saying "It's a original (=bit exact) 2008 CD by [Artist]"? That's not going away no matter how crappy it is. And if we do nuke ourselves out of existance, I'm not REALLY concerned with what alien archeologists think of us anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not to mention, Latin as you would learn it today is not really Latin as spoken by real people. There are very few surviving Latin texts written in Vulgar Latin -- complete with all the slang, misspellings indicating the direction the language was shifting or from whence it had come, etc. -- before it fully differentiated into the modern Romance languages we know today. Interestingly, one of the most important surviving texts is some chick named Egeria's vacation diary. That and some graffiti is about all we really have.
What most people would deem useless is full of linguistic, maybe economic, and sociological references that make a rough sketch of someone from today a much more useful and rich cultural portrait when it is available (i.e. somehow preserved). Think on that next time you post a blog entry or snap a few vacation photos.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.