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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.
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.
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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.
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
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?
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Statues?
Even better: it is actually 3D.
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