Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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.