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Data Archiving Standards Need To Be Future-Proofed
storagedude writes Imagine in the not-too-distant future, your entire genome is on archival storage and accessed by your doctors for critical medical decisions. You'd want that data to be safe from hackers and data corruption, wouldn't you? Oh, and it would need to be error-free and accessible for about a hundred years too. The problem is, we currently don't have the data integrity, security and format migration standards to ensure that, according to Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. Newman calls for standards groups to add new features like collision-proof hash to archive interfaces and software.
'It will not be long until your genome is tracked from birth to death. I am sure we do not want to have genome objects hacked or changed via silent corruption, yet this data will need to be kept maybe a hundred or more years through a huge number of technology changes. The big problem with archiving data today is not really the media, though that too is a problem. The big problem is the software that is needed and the standards that do not yet exist to manage and control long-term data,' writes Newman.
'It will not be long until your genome is tracked from birth to death. I am sure we do not want to have genome objects hacked or changed via silent corruption, yet this data will need to be kept maybe a hundred or more years through a huge number of technology changes. The big problem with archiving data today is not really the media, though that too is a problem. The big problem is the software that is needed and the standards that do not yet exist to manage and control long-term data,' writes Newman.
Keep your important data on current mainstream storage. This is the only way to preserve it - copy data from old disks to new disks whenever you upgrade.
Of course at each upgrade you can also discard a lot of data that isn't necessary, but pictures and similar stuff shall be preserved. Data formats for images have been stable for the last decades. Even though some improvements have occurred a 25 year old jpg is still viewable.
However some document formats have to be upgraded to latest version since especially Microsoft have a tendency to "forget" their old versions. You may still lose some formatting, but the content of the documents is the important.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The ultimate strategy is to duplicate it in so many different areas that at least one of them survives. Preferably multiple ones.
The more critical the data, the more spots you duplicate it in.
Though you have to realize that eventually everything will be lost.
I don't read AC A human right