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Avoiding a Digital Dark Age
al0ha writes to recommend a worthwhile piece up at American Scientist on the problems of archiving and data preservation in an age where all data are stored digitally. "It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the 'digital dark age.' This is the idea — or fear! — that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us. ... Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it."
Our landfills will provide all the info they need.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The main way ancient writing reached us is because someone copied it. Lots of copies. Sometimes translated into another language and back, for example, a lot of Greek learning went into Arabic and came back out into Latin or Greek. With all the copy protection and encryption on our media today, can we ever copy the data and be able to decipher it again?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
It is indeed a big problem. The problem was illustrated recently when Yahoo suddenly pulled the plug on Geocities, wiping out a vast cultural archive that went back to the early days of the internet, a lot of valuable information was lost as a result of that. Yahoo's blatant arrogance caused me to refuse to ever use any of their products again. Geocities was actually a fairly nice service, often people criticised it because of the ads, but how do you pay to continue to offer a free service. The loss of geocities was a perfect example of the need for a permenant store or online archive of information, personal websites and so on that can be maintained as a cultural legacy and informational resource.
I think that many people are failing to appreciate the longevity of information preservation
that cloud computing (more specifically, redundant, geographically distributed network storage) can bring.
If we get the protocols right, and insist on open standards for data interchange, we can obtain
properties such as:
Data bundles that know how to move themselves to more recently commissioned, and/or more
reliable hosts.
Data bundles that know how to check in with copies of themselves, to make sure there are enough of
them alive, and that they are adequately geographically distributed, at every given moment.
If not, then more baby copies of the same data would be produced and stored elsewhere automatically.
There are other issues to longevity of course, like maintenance of software that understands different
versions of data etc. Not trivial but very doable.
How long an individual disk or SSD or stone tablet lasts is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to
the prospects for information longevity, given the network, and new levels of automated distribution
that will take place on it going forward.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Many of the laws that overly stymie information flow (DMCA etc.), I think, are just a knee jerk reaction in the way printing presses were suppressed, and controlled until everyone realised the benefits of having them opened up.
Barbarians have always burned down libraries. No reason to think they'd stop doing that just because they wear ties these days.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.