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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."
I'm not sure if they "got it right". After a few thousand years we have yet to agree on what they were even writing.
Seriously what a piece of complete and utter rubbish. From Ancient Egypt we have an extremely limited set of information because stone tablets crack and they aren't exactly the most portable things in the world. Go through to the Romans and paper, and the Chinese and you are seeing massively more information become available down the centuries. Zoom forwards into the 14th Century and we have a massively detailed view of what life was like which becomes more and more detailed as time goes by. The key here is detail, the amount of information in Ancient Egypt was huge, probably comparable to today, but the amount that was etched onto pyramids was tiny and quite a lot of that didn't survive anyway.
The key things that future historians need are prime sources and one thing that the internet is massively impressive at is the duplication of information and the avoidance of redundancy. Stone is rubbish for this, no-one bothers making copies so you lose the original and you lose everything.
Printing introduced simpler copies which meant that the information was more likely to survive down the years. With modern digital technology this increases still further. It is ridiculous to claim that digitally we won't have more information about the major events and people of today which is available in 400 years. We will have more CRAP available in 400 years (blogs, twitter, Slashdot) than any generation of historians have had to wade through.
Digital technology makes accurate duplication simple and that is the most powerful way to make sure information survives. Wikileaks is the embodiment of that view. The issue is that there is now SO MUCH CRAP that the issue for future historians will be in wading through all of the blog posts of "Obama is a Muslim" to find out that in fact he wasn't.
A rubbish supposition which is massively undermined by every time there is a censorship case the plea to "mirror the information".
Some information will be lost but the amount that will survive is miles higher than the amount of information that survived from Ancient Egypt. For instance its amazing to Bible Literalists that NOT ONCE in their SIX THOUSAND YEARS OF RECORDED HISTORY did the ancient Egyptians ever mention all getting drowned in a global flood... and you'd have thought they'd have noticed that.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If it wasn't for the lucky find and preservation of the Rosetta stone, how long would it have taken us to decipher Egyptian hierogylphics? Not exactly an open standard...
I know nothing about the field of data preservation, but is there a Darwinian pruning of data that occurs? Do we really need to keep copies of ALL of our data for thousands of years, or do the truly "vital" emails/books/stone tablets have a much greater lifespan because they have actual value?
I'd show you some examples, but they kinda fell to pieces sometime around 200BC. What we have left is the stuff that preserves well.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
The problem is, you don't necessarily know NOW which things will be worth preserving.
Digital information can be easily duplicated and transferred to other media. You can save the entire library of congress on hard disk, convert it to DVD, or print it out on paper. And all of it can be almost fully automated with near zero chance of error. Try doing a backup of your stone tablet library in a reasonable amount of time, labor, and accuracy. There is just no comparison.
I really thought there was going to be something special here, that the ancient Egyptians found some way to preserve data better we do now in modern society.
Does the author not realize that he's only looking at a rock that survived, and not one of the millions of rocks that turned to dust over the years?
If someone in 5,000 years finds a USB flash drive exhibit in some park with the data still readable off the device, that will not be proof that USB flash storage is the ultimate in storage technology, it'll only prove that that one USB flash drive lasted for 5,000 years.
It is possible to erase them
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The whole article is ridiculous. The first sentence is
My wife and I were in New York's Central Park last fall when we saw a nearly 4,000-year-old Egyptian obelisk that has been remarkably well preserved, with hieroglyphs that were clearly legible
What is remarkable about that? If you want to put a ancient Egypt rock in the Central Park, do you use a shattered obelisk where you can't read anything or do you take the nice one?
And how ignorant is the author to ignore all the broken, lost and otherwise destroyed rocks that didn't survive?
If you want to write an article about the lack of metadata standards and your perceived lack of long-term storage options, fine, but don't built it around your wifes spontaneous epiphanies.
Mankind != important in the grand scheme of things, thus nothing we produce is all that important either.
That is more than likely true, but in the the grand scheme of mankind, mankind is the most important thing. So yes, the universe will continue on, but what the grand majority of people are truly concerned about is mankind, and preserving our history is a uniquely interesting aspect of advancing mankind.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
Oh, past cultures had their share of porn too. If you ever get to Lima, Peru, check out the Museum of Erotic Ceramics (or whatever it's proper name is). The Inca and pre-Inca made some, ah, interesting stuff. They weren't the only ones of course - I haven't seen them myself but there are wall paintings, etc, in Pompeii that generally don't get included in the usual textbooks.
Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the ancient "Venus" figurines that archaeologists call fertility goddesses were really porn.
-- Alastair
The Rosetta Stone for this era will be all the multilingual manuals for microwave ovens, DVD players, cameras, phones, etc.
Still, I'm not going to waste time "documenting my life" on Facebook or Twitter.
Neither will any other intelligent person.
But just as it's useful for us to have the personal letters and effects of Great Men and ordinary folks from the past, copies of newspapers from the 1800s, etc, etc, it will be useful for some of our descendants to have a record of our communications, thoughts, hopes, dreams, etc, plus the real reasons why W invaded Iraq.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It baffles me to see how people can possibly think in terms of "humans are the most intelligent animal on the planet, and thus must be the only animal that matters".
Something tells me that such thinking is not unique to humans. Take beavers for example. Do you really think they give a damn what their dams end up doing to any other species. Of course not, all they see is what's in it for them.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-