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."

Comments

Re:Won't matter

[Third Position]

Our landfills will provide all the info they need.

Well, I'm not entirely sure of that. If you pick up a stone or a paper with characters on it, you at least have an idea what it's purpose was. But 5000 years from now, how does someone interpret a shiny little disk? It might be a long, long time before someone is able to discern it's purpose, let along figure out how it's encoded and how to un-encode it. And that's even before getting a look at the language, and learning how to translate that.

That's one advantage of paper, stone and parchment - they don't assume a technical infrastructure in order to use them.

I have heard that some of the braided ropes left by Mayans might actually be a "written" language. But consider that it's taken us over 500 years to suspect these braids are a form of media, let alone learned to read it, and you can imagine what a future civilization might be confronting trying to figure out our digital media.

924 Years and nothing has changed

[rudy_wayne]

The Domesday Book was commisioned in December 1085 by King William (aka William the Conqueror, who invaded ngland in 1066). The first draft was completed in August 1086 and contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time). It is a detailed statement of lands held by he king and by his tenants and of the resources that went with those lands. It records which manors rightfully belonged to which estates, thus ending years of confusion resulting from the gradual and sometimes violent dispossession of the Anglo-Saxons by their Norman conquerors.

In 1986, at a cost of £2.5 million, the UK compiled the contents of the Domesday Book into electronic form that was stored on laserdiscs. The information stored on the laserdiscs, which is the equivalent of several sets of encyclopedias, is now unreadable because the equipment needed to read the discs is no longer available. Meanwhile the original book is still readable after more than 900 years.

Lots of other things to consider

[syousef]

In my own quest to preserve my digital photos, I've created multiple backups on hard disk including a remote backup which gets updated every few months. I use different disks created by different manufacturers and buy new disks every couple of years (but do not throw away old copies).

I've recently come across another aspect that isn't addressed by the article. Data that is in use in an online copy can be modified (including corrupted).There is no point in copying/propagating data if the data you are copying is damaged. Typically this has happened when I've tried DAM software like Lightroom which will modify the original file despite claiming to be non-destructive I have no proof that photos were re-encoded or quality was reduced but I do know original files were altered, and I want an original unaltered file preserved

Most people when they backup files do very little verification to ensure the files they are copying today are the same files that were created 5 or 10 years ago. They rely too much on backup software to do this for them, with no attention paid to what's happened to the data between copies. To keep this under control I've started putting checksums on all my photo files, which I check when I create a fresh copy.

Of course where my photos are captured in a proprietary format I copy to an open or at least well documented format (typically jpg, sometimes also tif). This is done as soon as I transfer the photos, which are not removed from the camera card until i have 2 additional copies. So I shouldn't have the same issues that the author had assuming jpg can still be read throughout my lifetime.

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Sammy