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Data Preservation and How Ancient Egypt Got It Right
storagedude writes to tell us that a storage geek has an interesting article on why ancient Egyptians were better than us at data preservation — and what we need to do to get caught up. "After rocks, the human race moved on to writing on animal skins and papyrus, which were faster at recording but didn't last nearly as long. Paper and printing presses were even faster, but also deteriorated more quickly. Starting to see a pattern? And now we have digital records, which might last a decade before becoming obsolete. Recording and handing down history thus becomes an increasingly daunting task, as each generation of media must be migrated to the next at a faster and faster rate, or we risk losing vital records."
A lot of data retention is because of legal requirements. At the bank I work at, we're required to keep *everything* for at least seven years - all our emails are archived, instant messenger communications, etc.
There's no place like localhost
Interesting, TFA goes on about strategies for making sure stuff lasts. But he even touches on the more interesting facet of this briefly - no one can read the damn Hieroglyphs any more, so what does it matter that it lasted 4000 years?
What is more interesting to me is a way to cheaply, efficiently, include a sort of Rosetta Stone along with archival data meant for long-term storage. Hell, even the devices themselves... he talks at the end a bit about format issues, frex. Some kind of key to the interface or logic needed to reconstruct the method of reading the medium..? Anyone got a wax cylander lying around? If you ran across one, how long would it take you to be able to hear what was on it - and what're the odds of you damaging it in the process, especially if you had to dig up schematics and build a player yourself..?
That which does not kill us makes us... st
you don't have to destroy the nodes. Destroy the power plants, and the cloud evaporates.
The North east blackout of 2003 showed us. In a blink all of our data retention methods fail. Portable generators won't last long enough.
what is needed is two things. a way to store electricity that isn't chemical(battery), and multiple methods of power generation. So we aren't dependent on any one source. Local power storage and generation(Heck even 5kw on the roof of your home will pay for your air conditioning) will take the burden off the power grid. and then the cloud can still be up there.
Also storage on the cloud? are companies really that stupid? Clouds can be seen by everyone there won't be any truly secure cloud storage.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The entire piece consists of:
1. Saw an Egyptian obelisk which had lasted for a long time.
2. Our modern data preservation methods aren't built for longevity.
3. Rocks have better data integrity than digital archives.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be sure to keep that in mind when I'm deciding whether to save my memoirs on rock or .doc. Really helpful stuff.
Information that doesn't make it onto the Internet is still at risk. Historically important audio recordings from the 60s and 70s are badly decayed ("For those unfamiliar with the Nixon tapes, other than telephone conversations, they are extremely difficult to hear (in analog versions, and with the available equipment, it would take approximately 15 hours to transcribe one hour of Nixon's conversations)", and tapes of Creighton Abrams running the Vietnam War were barely playable).
Information that does make it into electronic form is still at risk. The Usenet archives from Dejanews.com almost got thrown away. The "deep web" is inaccessible to the Wayback Machine.
If you wanted something to last a thousand years, would you post it to Usenet (zillions of copies, all gone in fifty years when the backup tapes rot) or would you etch it onto an iridium tablet?
Orwell's loss of history was no accident. Not carelessness. It was a deliberate attack on it, to make it fit particular viewpoints.
A contemporary example would be the re-representing of the "founding fathers" as secular individuals.
In Soviet Russia it was the brutal repression of all knowledge of the state that went immediately before it. All history was but a "detail" not to be given much attention. All you needed to know about history is that it lead to the "great leader" taking control.
Historically many more states destroyed their history than preserved it. Ancient Egypt suppressed large parts of it's past. So did the Jewish kingdoms. The same goes for China. The Roman empire didn't repress history, but the Vandals and Visigoths (who were "democratic") did. All islamic states have massively repressed large parts of their history and have tried (and sometimes succeeded) in repressing external records of their history, and they're still doing it today. E.g. the ancient destruction of the (then Roman Catholic) library of alexandria, and more recent the destruction of a historical account of a trip through Persia by an Iranian agent. Perhaps the most well known destruction of history was the destruction of the Buddha's of Afghanistan. All muslim territory, except one part of a single city has only non-muslim historical sites. Mecca itself is the remains of a mostly Jewish traders' town. Saudi Arabia is teeming with mostly Jewish and Christian remains of city-states, forts, marketplaces and city walls, all knowledge of which is brutally repressed. So are countries like Egypt and Sudan, in fact the whole of Northern Africa is. Nearly all landmarks in Turkey are christian in origin, with the few remaining secular (the blue "mosque" was designed by a jew, modeled after the biggest christian church in existence), a fact that you best keep to yourself in Turkey.
Data loss will, like in the states before us, not be an accident. It will be deliberate destruction, like in Orwell's books.
It just takes a certain kind of person AND a certain kind of state to preserve anything of value in the first place.