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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."
As recording things became easier, more things were recorded. At some point we began recording things that no-one will ever care about, and now keep things recorded that we didn't even know were recorded (care to see my router logs?). The less significant something is, the less we need to worry about preserving it. Of course, there are things worth preserving, but most of it just isn't.
Etch barcodes into rocks.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yea, rocks don't need backups, but very few people could read them, and even less could 'etch' them.
I think the unprecedented decentralization and free flow of information of our time is far superior, even if the media we use is much less durable.
On the issue of formats he makes a very valid point tho. All we can do is support open formats and hope others follow our example so they gain momentum and become widespread and long lived.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
This is another case of only seeing part of the problem. Data preservation is easy. The problem is, we generate massive amounts of data. Data doesn't have an expiration date. It doesn't automatically categorize itself, know its own relevance, or volunteer itself for tasks. See, the vast majority of "data" floating around can be safely discarded. Do you really need an ethernet sniff log of everything you've done on the internet over the past ten years? The government might want a copy, but chances are pretty good its just as useless to them as you. How about those four (broken) copies of that mp3 you downloaded from Shareaza? Or outdated installers of software? Is there a reason to keep around those Netware 3.12 floppies (besides impressing other old farts)?
The problem isn't preserving data, it's knowing when to let it go. We have many, many, many methods of data preservation. We are drowning in information. The internet is generating petabytes worth of data every day, and only the smallest fraction of that really has any reuse value. And most of that, in six months, or a few years, probably not. What we need is better methods of sorting data, and ways to expire data safely.
Also, we also need control over our data. Corporations have been trying to take that away now for years. You don't need a copy of our software that can run on any computer, we're going to mung it up so it only runs on one computer, and if you have to reinstall the operating system or change the video card or anything else, that copy will cease to work. An irony, really -- because I know plenty of people that love playing old video games whose manufacturers long ago gave up on, but won't release the copyright for. Fifty years from now, I doubt a single copy of the game will still exist -- the concept, maybe. But it will have died and yet someone will still own the copyright and think money could be made off it. When we buy a chunk of data, we need to be able to control it, not just use it in some narrowly-defined way. Because otherwise, what's the point of data preservation in the first place? To stockpile more useless data that -- even worse, holding onto could be a liability to you?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Statues?
Even better: it is actually 3D.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The Rosetta Disk has spiraling text that gets smaller and smaller, telling you implicitly that what you need is a magnifier. It doesn't explain how to build a microscope, though.
what is needed is two things. a way to store electricity that isn't chemical(battery
This part can probably be handled by memristors.
Here's a hint... people have been saying "we'll lose the ability to support even our current numbers by " for a long time. We are currently nowhere near the highest efficiency possible for extracting food from the land. That highest efficiency doesn't even have to be environmentally devastating... thinking of farmland as a planned ecological space rather than a factory floor which produces one kind of crop can, according to some experimental farms, significantly raise the output per acre while reducing the ecological detriments. Basically, you end up with a designed forest with a mix of native and foreign species. One such farm I have heard about is primarily nut trees, which produces nuts at such a rate that the nutritional value per acre (I.E. the number of people it can feed) which exceeds grain fields several fold. This "farm" also supports berries, melons and several other crops in the same place and provides an excellent habitat for small and large game on a level which provide meat on a level that exceeds "traditional" farming by at least an order of magnitude once the hay-fields and croplands needed to feed livestock is taken into account. These lots can also provide a significant source of wood for timber and fuel if appropriately cultivated.
The major drawbacks of the "forest ecosystem farm" or whatever people will call them are an extremely high dependence on planning needs which can vary wildly from lot to lot, and they are not very suitable for current mechanization methods which will result in an increased need for human labor (which would be a relief to some people in the current economy.)
...is a collection of oral histories from Israel and the areas surrounding it, modified to promote the idea of one true God. The oral histories are a collection of both fictional morality tales and actual facts, and is therefore one of the best guides to what exactly was going on during the transition from pre-history.
That said, I am an atheist. I just don't discount the information that has been passed down for thousands of years as a bunch of hogwash, especially when much of it has in fact been proven true by following the text and discovering ancient ruined cities.
Can anyone tell me what the conversion factor is from Libraries of Congress to Libraries of Alexandria?
Yes.
Let the Iliad represent a typical ancient Greek text, occupying 24 scrolls. In a modern edition it occupies 1,589,248 bytes in Beta Code (= ASCII transliteration of ancient Greek), or 66,219 bytes per "book" (scroll).
Ptolemy II set a goal of half a million scrolls for the library. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate of the library's size at its height. However, let us work with conservative estimates. This gives us a ballpark figure of 33.1 billion bytes, or 30.8 gigabytes, for the Library of Alexandria.
For the Library of Congress, Wikipedia quotes figures of 20 TB and 10 TB. We take the more conservative estimate. That gives us a conversion rate of one Library of Congress to about 332 libraries of Alexandria.