Digital Dark Ages? 438
angkor writes "The digital dark age--Will all the information from this computer age slowly vanish as our delicate hardrives expire? That's what it looks like. Better start printing everything out."
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Digital Dark Ages?
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"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Dark ages? (Score:2, Funny)
I was under the impression that the defining characteristics of the dark ages was ignorance, suppression, warfare, famine, strife -- you know, BAD STUFF.
And by that I mean, worse than simply forgetting something you wrote down somewhere.
Sometimes I really wonder about the things you guys elevate to "front-page article" status...
Re:Dark ages? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a fit description of the Msft dominated computer industry alright.
Fact is, that's just what the comp industry WANTS - the old name is 'planned obsolence', nothing, very little anyway, is built to last. At best it's made to last 3 years then you thro it away and buy another. Gotta keep them customers spending $$$!
A co-worker was talking about archiving his ancient family photos with a scanner and CD writer - I told him if he's lucky within a generation a descendant or relative will take up the job of transfering them from CD to holographic crystals or whatever is the format du jour at the time. Just like the DNA code is recreated every generation.
I print out ALL online transactions involving $$$, just in case there's a dispute
Re:Dark ages? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the Dark Ages [liquidweb.com] are called that because there is very very little information about what happened in that period.
Re:Dark ages? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dark ages? (Score:4, Funny)
Witness George W. Bush, the Senate, the House and 50% of the US population.
suppression,
Witness DMCA, PATRIOT, RIAA etc.
warfare,
Witness the War on Drugs, War against Terrorism, War against Poverty not to mention all the real wars and civil uprisings around the world.
famine,
Witness Africa.
strife
Witness MS vs GPL, RIAA and MPAA vs Consumers etc
you know, BAD STUFF
Witnes Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. Now - picture them in an XXX-rated movie.
It's worse than you think. (Score:2)
Re:Mods ... (Score:2)
It's OK to be wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
There were 2 or 3 in the Roman empire, one that I believe lasted about 30 years. Several more cropped up before and after Charlemagne. A much smaller one is happening with books produced in a specific timeframe in the early 20th century (I disremember which). Because of the acid in the paper, they'll deteriorate and fall apart rapidly. Luckily, project gutenberg is making an effort in getting the info out of books this old.
So, it's OK to be wrong.
Re:It's OK to be wrong. (Score:4, Informative)
Not completely. Project Gutenberg can only use books printed before 1923. When I go looking for books for Project Gutenberg, a lot of the ones in really bad shape (include acid damage) were printed between 1940 and the mid 1960s. I fear for the typewritten stuff, especially, as it's appropaching unreadability even if it's only 30 years old.
The other major worry is films. They were produced largely on nitrate stock, which is highly volitile and wasn't even stored by the Library of Congress, and without immediate help in some cases (not forthcoming for copyrighted films) those left may be lost forever.
Re:Dark ages? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, it's a new definition for "dark ages", that's for sure.
I was under the impression that the defining characteristics of the dark ages was ignorance, suppression, warfare, famine, strife -- you know, BAD STUFF.
Actually, the period we call the "Dark Ages" is a period for which we have few written records. It's only 'dark' because we can't 'see' what was happening back then.
Re:Dark ages? (Score:2, Insightful)
Certainly we will still have the data just as we now have the equivalent of all those floppies we had. Wether we can read it all or not is unimportant. What is important is wether we can read what we need to. Most such documents are proted across since they are regulary used. The problem will come when some historical documents are needed. As long as they exist somewhere, someone (Historical, Researcher, database programmer) will be able to look them up.
There was an article in Scientific America about bombing records from the Vietnam war stored in a mainframe being recovered to remove the bombs. Where there is a need there will be a way to seek and find the past. We know what the Egyptians ate for breakfast how much more will our anscestors know about us?
No because... (Score:3, Funny)
You honestly don't think that the contents of your hard drive have any sort of historical importance, do you?
Just because you've saved every free pr0n pic you've ever downloaded and categorized them neatly doesn't mean that some future archeologist is going to find them interesting. I can find them useful immediately. Please send any such collection to me at my hotmail address. Thank you.
Re:No because... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the year 2675, when some archeologist try to puzzle together what the world looked like at the beginning of the century, any info at all will be very valuable.
Even your collection of porn.
Re:No because... (Score:2)
I'd better work on creating a large archive of this for future archeologists!
Re:No because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your trash says an awful lot about you, as does the random splay of stuff strewn around your room. Future archaeologists may not be interested in the porn on your hard drive (unless they have to dig it out), but future anthropologists would find it very interesting (and not in the normal manner people find porn interesting, though that may be there too, never know). It says alot about you, an inhabitant of wherever you are, living in the year 2002, as does all the collected sundry data on your drive. It may certainly seem boring as hell to anyone else, but historians and anthropologists can get a whole lot of useful information out of it. It's no less boring than reading through book after book, or letter after letter in the dead tree sense, and in some ways it's alot easier, as you can't write a regular expression to pull whatever interesting tidbits you are looking for out of a book.
Re:No because... (Score:2)
You honestly don't think that the contents of your hard drive have any sort of historical importance, do you?
In our time, the shoebox of old letters has been replaced with email archives. I keep significant emails indefinitely, as they are the closest thing I have to a chronicle of my life (at least for recent years). The personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and T.S. Eliot are of great significance to historians and literary critics. Furthermore, I would love for my great-grandchildren to be able to read through their great-grandparents' online courtship. Same with people's personal blogs, livejournals and the like, which have replaced our forebears' bound diaries that many of us read with great interest when we find them. It would be a shame for such detailed records of our lives to be kept, then lost.
Re:Ferrous based magnetic tapes last FOREVER! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, They will still be 1.44 MB. They will still be included in all computers. They will still work slowly. But they're reliable! And they will still use FAT12..
*gag* isn't it time this particular media format died
Re:Ferrous based magnetic tapes last FOREVER! (Score:2)
In a time when my digital camera can store more than 100 floppies, who needs them? Almost everything that I download or exchange doesn't fit on one anymore. Oh and I never boot from a floppy, I use a bootable Debian CD or something.
People used Zip disks for a while, but that's fading too.
Dave
Re:Ferrous based magnetic tapes last FOREVER! (Score:2)
The solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The solution (Score:2, Informative)
They even archive linked files and images. So, you could post your old mailboxes. Encrypt them, if needed. By the time future archeologists find it, it should be easily crackable, if legal.
Re:The solution (Score:4, Funny)
Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
-- Linus Torvalds
Not much of a solution (Score:2)
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken. Sure, it might take a lot of time now - but computers in 5 years will do it in a matter of minutes, while serving web pages and mp3's in the background. Come on, nothing is forever.
Re:Not much of a solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not much of a solution (Score:2)
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken.
Not true. Encryption with a truly-random one time pad is proveably unbreakable.
Lose the pad and you're screwed.
I just realized (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I just realized (Score:2)
I'd expect it to be a feature on the next iteration of ATA, though.
Hard drive DRM - consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
You can say it'll never succeed - won't all Linux's rich patrons prevent it? But I would have said the same about quite a few other things that have already happened... and it's in our interests to act as thought it might.
However, assuming something slightly less than the worst, DRM will of necessity be something which you can enable or not. IOW, as long as they'll let you, buy all the fast, new DRM drives you want, and use Linux to run them. Linux will simply ignore the DRM features and use the drive normally.
The problems come when you're forced to use a DRM operating system with your DRM hardware (quite a reversal from the old antitrust days, eh?); you will find it very difficult to take some/all of your data back to Linux/other non-DRM OS.
You can probably see why MS loves this now; DRM technologies, even optional ones, will have the nice effect of preventing interoperability with open source operating systems, thereby locking everyone in even further. Let alone the myriad other possibilities for abuse, censorship, and bottlenecking...
If we allow our government to do this, both in the context of MS's current status as a monopolist, and in the ongoing (anti-) regulation of the media industries, we are doing the gravest disservice to future generations.
Re:I just realized (Score:2)
I know the trouble it is to get my system back up to speed after re-installing windows. I can't imagine if I have to go through whatever hurdles will be necessary to re-authenticate my license to dozens of various applications, and hundreds or thousands of media files. And when was the last time any customer database system ever worked perfectly. I have a feeling at least one out of a hundred people will get "lost" in the system and will have to be re-issued new authentication tokens, and will have to re-apply for the license to all of their software. Ugh.
Re:I just realized (Score:2)
I'm American and I have the right, god damn it, to use a computer any way I want to. If I go to jail for it, well, poor me. But I had the right to take the chance. Anything else is pre-crime and 1984./
Digital dark age.. (Score:3, Insightful)
They really should warn the people that they are going to be posting a link to their server, and that extremely heavy traffic will arrise.
This surprises you how? (Score:4, Interesting)
You've got photojournalism people shooting digital because it's faster and offers some image structure advantages at high speed- no negatives to keep around for a 50 year retrospective.
And finally, you'll have the home consumer trying to back up all his photos to CD, organize them, and get thru the thousands upon thousands (note- most neg drawers aren't well organized either, but... ) of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
Nothing will change until this starts happening. Give it 3 to 5 years, or however long it takes joe and Jane to upgrade their computers and start losing stuff. Then some sense will get back into the world
Re:This surprises you how? (Score:3, Insightful)
You've got photojournalism people shooting digital because it's faster and offers some image structure advantages at high speed- no negatives to keep around for a 50 year retrospective.
And finally, you'll have the home consumer trying to back up all his photos to CD, organize them, and get thru the thousands upon thousands (note- most neg drawers aren't well organized either, but... ) of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
I know a guy, a keen photographer who got his wife and kid out the house before the fire really took hold. He didn't get his twenty-odd year collection of thousands of slides and negs out though. This was in the Eighties before he could have afforded to get them all digitised to a high standard.
All he has now are a few prints and some contact sheets of all that work. His pics of his mother -- gone. Snaps of his beloved boyhood dog taken with his birthday-present first camera -- gone. Forever.
He still shoots film and slide, medium format too. He digitises *everything*.
Why most of your data isn't really important (Score:3, Insightful)
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
You know, I think in many ways it's good to loose stuff like this. Sure, it's upsetting for a while, but you get over it.
Memories are just that - in your memory, and whilst photos are good for jogging memories, that's all they do. For anyone who's not actually in the picture, they mean nothing. And really, it's far healthier to look to the future than reminiscing about past events. This might seem heartless, but how often do you actually look at 10-20 year old photos? Maybe with dead family members it's another matter, but if they were really close, you should be able to remember them without a photo.
And it's amazing how much crap you can assimilate over time. After I went travelling for a year with just a rucksack (two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, etc...) I was horrified when I returned to realise how much junk I had in my parent's house that I'd previously considered important. Most of it went straight in the bin, as I sure as hell wasn't carting it to my next house.
Bringing it slightly back on topic. Yes, I've had hard disk failures. In one case, I even lost about a years worth of mail. But after being initially cross about my mail, I realised that I didn't actually need it anyway. The rest of the stuff I never even missed, as I'd backup up about the 5% that was useful.
For actual important stuff, like source code or documents, you just need to be disciplined enough to copy them somewhere reasonably regularly. I use local CVS for all my own source and just back up the whole tree every couple of days. I download stuff into a folder like '2002-07' for this month, and every month I backup anything to CD that is likely to be useful. Everything else can just be downloaded again, re-MP3'd, etc...
I'm just worried about how long my CD-R's will last...
Why you're wrong about this (Score:3, Insightful)
But even if this were so, how do you show your child what his granddad looked like, who died before your child was born??
The point of archiving data is not just so YOU can remember it. It's so people who had no chance to see it firsthand can also get a look at how things were (regardless of the sort of data it is).
Re:This surprises you how? (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, I have digital information that I have been carrying around since I owned an Apple ][c. With the rapidly decreasing cost of storage it is very inexpensive to hang onto old data. Mix in an offsite backup or two and your house can even burn down without losing your information. You certainly can't say that about your paper documents.
Ooooh, be afraid (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder why Y2K didn't serve as a wake-up call? Maybe it's because basically nothing bad happened? Yes, it cost a ton of money to correct the problem, but there were no huge catastrophes like segments of the media had predicted.
In the same way, yes, hard drives will crash, and people will lose stuff. But this is nothing new! The idea of a "digital dark age" where hard drives start crashing left and right, and history starts going down the drain, is absurd. It ranks up there with the pre-Y2K hype about society crashing and people roaming the streets in search of food. But hey, your story is a success if people will read it and take the hype to heart, right?
It is that hard! (Score:2)
"Ok Mom, here's what you do. Get your last CD and compare the file stamp on it to the files on your HD. Copy anything that is newer into a temporary folder. Then fire up the burner program and copy those files into the
No, until it's automated backup/automated recovery, it's gonna be a pain in the ass for anyone.
Most systems have 1 hd 1 cdrom. If you're lucky it has a burner.
One bit of fiction on the subject... (Score:4, Interesting)
Problems are legal, not technical (Score:5, Interesting)
But the only reason these archives can be built and maintained is that it is legal to do so, thanks to the hard work of preservationists like Bob Supnik (see his SIMH [trailing-edge.com] "old iron" simulation packages) and Warren Toomey who have secured such licenses. Without such permission, many other archives of historical software that I've assembled myself cannot be distributed to the rest of the world.
Re:Problems are legal, not technical (Score:3, Insightful)
For the most part, I think that TUHS and the PDP10 archives have done so well because of the efforts of a few hardcore packrats. Most of the Slashdot readers who have so casually poo-pooed this article are the same sort of person, myself included. We save everything. We do backups. We feel like we could restore our computers after a crash.
But that viewpoint is so short term. What happens when we die? (no, i'm not discussing theology here!) What becomes of our computers and our scattered tapes labeled "/usr (dump) 1994-02-12"? Will we have digital executors who look after it for us? I somehow doubt it.
The argument can be made that most of the lost information is unimportant, but I'm not sure I buy that either. A lot of it may well be. A lot of it will be accumulated junk a future society can live just fine without. But it is impossible to know what will be and won't be important in the future. You really never know. And while I don't think we want to save every single bit of information ever created, we should at least do ourselves the service of trying to come up with a better solution than just trusting everything to work itself out in the end. There's no harm in thinking about it a little, people.
Re:Problems are legal, not technical (Score:5, Insightful)
So when it comes time to do a time series study, 1960 doesn't get included. Nobody knows how to get at the information. Or whether or not it even still exists.
There may be legal problems, but there are also both organizational and technical problems. And they are all significant. In this case all of the factors would have needed to cooperate to get the problem solved. And to maintain their cooperation over time.
And we still don't know how important the loss of that data was. We may never know. It could have been worth multiple millions, or nothing. We can't even tell. So everyone is just ignoring the event, because it's too uncomfortable to think about. And while we ignore it, there are the tape cartridges from an IBM 3330 that are sitting around in storage, because somebody wanted them cleared off his desk. And that kind of tape cartridge was only in use for a few years, and was never widely popular. Nobody knows what's on those cartridges, but it probably isn't as important as the census data might have been. And it's probably unreadable too. And I have a box of 5 1/4 single density floppies that have the original source code for one of our major projects. If there is a version that got converted, I don't know where it is. And I don't have a 5 1/4 inch drive. When I got them, I has a Mac (made great sense to give them to me, huh?), and by the time I was coerced into a PC, the PCs only had 3 1/2 inch drives. So it never made sense for me to have them, and I don't even use the project. But I have the only copy that I know about. Maybe it won't be important.
Data is already evaporating right and left. I see it happening every day. Most times it doesn't matter much, but you can't always tell at the time. And often the reasons that it evaporates are technical. And organizational. Legal problems are rarely the issue, though they can be in unusual circumstances, like proprietary software that the company stops maintaining for some reason (like going out of business).
slashdot dark ages (Score:2)
They _are_ replacable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They _are_ replacable (Score:2)
1989: "Wow, TWO floppy drives!"
1994: "Wow, 800 Megs ON A SINGLE DISK!"
1995: "This 2G Hard disk cost me $350.. but i have all the space i need for YEARS"
1996: "This 5G hard disk is more space than i see myself needing.."
1998: "This MP3 thing is COOL! Ah, fruck.. need a burner and another 20 Gigs, but, god i'll never fill -that- up."
2000: "This Divx thing really rocks, but with this 20 Gigs, im running out of space.. time to get a couple 40 gigs.."
2002: I'm about to buy a couple 80 GB drives and stripe the mofos. AND a DVD-R for backup..
It's called redundancy (Score:2)
Now certainly, this scheme is vunerable to an FBI raid, but not a single hard drive failure.
The author is right though, we do need a simpler system for redundant network backup. I would love to have a transparent and secure way of storing my files on the Internet, something like freenet, but with garanteed retrieval (freenet eventually loses stuff that is not popular, which means it will certainly lose any file I might store on it's network).
Sure garanteed redundant Internet based file storage would probably cost money, but I'd be willing to pay per megabyte (besides, the stuff I really care about doesn't take up that much space).
-josh
problem for archives (Score:2)
Re:problem for archives (Score:2, Interesting)
I have heard a theory (don't remember where, think it was in a history class) that every once in a while there is some kind of destruction of a great center of knowledge, and the human race looses a large chunk of the knowledge it has gained up to that point. It is thought that this is one of the reasons we can't figure out how some of the great wonders of the world were built (like the pyramids). The knowledge is simply lost, and we must discover it, or an equivalent, again.
Re:problem for archives (Score:2, Informative)
This just seems to me like a silly anti-christian-hegemony fad or something... It's just a historical term that still works perfectly well...
Re:problem for archives (Score:2)
SD
Yes, this is worrisome (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me offer one example. When historians want to document the impact that computers and the "information revolution" had on people's lives, there's only so much value in the Wired archives, for example. How did everyday people (not e-publishers or the digital literati) interact with machines and each other? This kind of research depends on many small bits of information, and if there is sytematic bias in which (or whose) information gets preserved then research will inevitably be limited by that bias. In short, don't underestimate the value of large numbers of seemingly unimportant documents.
This raises the question: what can be done to preserve the electronic record created by everyday users? Is any preservation medium cheap and easy enough to become ubiquitous in off-the-shelf systems?
For posterity (Score:2, Funny)
F5
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FP!
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*BSD is dying!
Submit
F5
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FP!!! Eat my frosty piss, muthafuckas!!
Submit
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F5
Re:Yes, this is worrisome (Score:2)
The real problem is that most people have gigabytes of trash or stuff that is easily recoverable, like downloads, object files and executables, and a few hundred kilobytes of crucially important data like their own original program sources. Automatic backup systems are too stupid to tell which is which, and manual backups just don't get done.
Re:Yes, this is worrisome (Score:2)
My Mom is into geneology. Due to a lack of information, most people can't trace their roots back more than 2-300 years, and at the extreme ends of that you have nothing more than a name, location, and occupation.
Wouldn't it be *fabulous* to have a detailed chronology of what some ancestor of yours did day by day over 800 years ago?
Anyways, my point being that I've always realized just how useful and intersting this would be. So I've never regretted my information-packrat nature. I have a copy of every e-mail I've ever sent and received. I have a copy of a large fraction of my usenet posts and Slashdot posts. And of course everything I've ever thought was interesting that I've downloaded (like your post). And I have two computers with mirrored copies of the data. Since I'm always upgrading systems, the hard drives are never more than 5 years old, and I'll always notice the failure of one.
I'm even slowly beginning to digitize all the letters my Mom has written me over the years. And I'm talking about 16 pages every week for 10 years! Yeah yeah, she tells me a little too much about life in small town Saskatchewan, like what part of the garden the dog was digging in and where they saw a snake while out for a walk, etc etc.
Oddly enough my Mom doesn't believe that anyone will ever be intersted in what she writes in her letters. But you have to remember, "forever" is a long long time. Think eons.
There is of course one small caveat. This would all be spectacularly interesting if I was a monk in 1283 AD. But I'm a geek in the middle of the information age. There's going to be a TON of similar information for someone to look through a few hundred years from now.
Oh well.
Re:Yes, this is worrisome (Score:3, Funny)
It's been tried ... (Score:3, Funny)
Just printing out is not enough! (Score:4, Funny)
No, if your data really has value, carve it in clay and burn it. Or carve it in stone. While those methods are still not completely safe, they are at least reasonably safe.
Given the amount of data to store, we should probably build pyramids again, and carve our data into the stones of the pyramids. Given how long the Egypt pyramids lasted, this seems like a really secure way of storing the data.
Of course, I don't want to be an archaeologist in a few thousand years trying to decipher those strange texts e.g. inside the Linux Kernel Pyramid...
Re:Just printing out is not enough! (Score:2)
So you are also encrypting the data into the pyramids? Won't that just be a pain in the ass to archaelogists down the road? And we thought heiroglyphics were bad.....
Of course, it does seem like a relatively reliable storage medium, but by itself offers nothing more in terms of security
Re:Just printing out is not enough! (Score:3, Funny)
Ah, but you forget about the curse of the mummy
Re:Just printing out is not enough! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Nothing new... (Score:2)
I think digital data is easier in some way because you can preserve identical copies easily and transfer to an other system is easier as well, try moving/reordering an paper archive.
IMHO, preservation is a major argument for open formats and open source software though. It gives you the change to make sure for yourself you have the format and source to read it preserved with the data. Try getting your hands on Office 95 in, say, 2142...
redundancy is your friend (Score:2)
The peer-to-peer file sharing systems out there are like a public-access ftp server, or a wiki, or any of the hundreds of different ways that information will stay alive when people care to keep it. With a hundred million users all trying to collect as much interesting information as possible, you end up with a reasonable, thorough data filter to make backups for every important piece of classical knowledge that you'll need a few decades from now.
The Long Now Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
"Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s."
That's why they started the 10k year library project [longnow.org]. A part of this project that interests me especially is the Rosetta Project [rosettaproject.org]. It's a "near permanent archive of 1,000 languages". It's still a work in progress, so I hope they succeed. In my eyes it's definitely a worthwhile endeavour.
Re:The Long Now Foundation (Score:2, Insightful)
Huge chunks of what Minsky said are irrelevant. Books have been written mocking his 'pie-in-the-sky' dreaming. (See Herbert Dreyfus)
His important work has been published. His notes, just like the chips of rock that fell away when hierglyphs were carved in stone, need to just go away.
I know Minsky was just picked as an example, but the point is, the wheat has to be separated from the chaff, or all of everything gets lost in a sea of 'information-enthropy'.
Technological advance (Score:2, Insightful)
Along with data copying, technology is delivering home users progressively better storage mediums. From 5.25" to 2.5" floppies, to hard drives, to CD-Rs, each media lasts longer than the previous. We'll eventually get it to archaeological standards.
HD-Rosetta Dssks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:HD-Rosetta Disks (Score:3, Interesting)
just use raid-5 (Score:2)
Re:just use raid-5 (Score:4, Funny)
This assumes that only one drive in the array will fail at a time, and between complete verified drive rebuilds. The Raid 5 drive arrays I've seen put together are usually built from a group of new drives, all the same drive model all purchased at the same time. I've seen enough bad production runs for various hard drives to know that it is _too_ easy to get stuck with a group of lemons.
Now imagine a lemon fails. You slap in the replacement, and think all is well, you order another hot-swappable replacement. While it's on the way, two more drives fail. To use a quote in backdraft, that little blinking light in the corner of your vision is your career dissipation light, and it just went into overdrive.
The following additional situations make me think offsite, up-to-date backups are still a VERY good thing:
- Lightning strike or massive power surge
- Water damage (pipe breaking?)
- Drop-damage (well, actually it's the sudden stop)
- Fire (I'm sure SOME companies have a Milton working for them)
- Earthquake
- Tornado
- Hurricane
- People unexpectedly parking their vehicles in your building, violently.
- Pissed off employees with physical or electronic access to the data
- Theft/burglary
And let's not forget good old human nature. "Oops, I didn't mean to delete that..."
"He who laughs last usually had a VERIFIED backup."
Re:just use raid-5 (Score:2)
Let me have a go at that.
- Lightning strike or massive power surge
Could certainly happen.
- Water damage (pipe breaking?)
If we had water damage on our server, I think we'd be more worried about the water being 5 meters (15') above street levels.
- Drop-damage (well, actually it's the sudden stop)
Well, the house would have to collaps, and that would probably wreck everything.
- Fire (I'm sure SOME companies have a Milton working for them)
Who me? I never play with fire at the work place.
- Earthquake
In Denmark? We get them all the time. The last one meassured a violent 2.5 on the richter scale.
- Tornado
Yeah - right
- Hurricane
Well, we're probably more likely to be hit by a tornado.
- People unexpectedly parking their vehicles in your building, violently.
Again, this office being on the second floor, that'd be a sight for sore eyes
- Pissed off employees with physical or electronic access to the data
Only if they fire me
- Theft/burglary
Could happen.
"Oops, I didn't mean to delete that..."
I have never done that. Nope. Not me. Never.
already begun (Score:3, Funny)
This Is An Ancient Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.
Re:This Is An Ancient Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Something which is a greater loss to historians and archeologists is the lack of documents from regular people. Private letters, business records, etc. These can tell a lot more about society than pieces of fiction.
Keeping Everything != Keeping Everything Organized (Score:2, Insightful)
Amen, to that! And more often it's practically a full-time job, just shuffling all of it around, from one over-flowing server to the next.
--Logan
Back to the scriptorium? (Score:2, Insightful)
Which one's more vulnerable, a set of negatives and a single set of prints bent into a camera shop envelope high in my closet, or a digital photo on my hard drive? Sure, hard drives have a designed window before obsolescence, especially in the consumer market. Basically that's because the cost of enhancing their reliability is less than the cost of a whomping new drive that dwarfs the old one every three years. Even so, though -- hey, how many photos do you have from your great great grandparents' trip to Tahoe in the year aught-six?
If we're talking about preserving the works of Aristotle, I'm betting on hard drives to do a better job than monks with feather quills. (Not that the monks didn't draw better pictures in the margins, doodling along the way.)
Old Stuff? (Score:2)
Wait... that sounds like a massive DDoS attack on the Internet. Reality is definitely getting ahead of fiction here...
I Want To Be Forgotten (Score:2)
200 years from now, anything I did that was worthy of recognition will be ingrained in the fabric of what is then. Anyone that seriously cares about the other stuff I did (like that
Bottom line: who cares about the crap we do now 200 years into the future? The good stuff will persist on its own merits and the trash was meant to be forgotten.
Vortran out
File formats (Word) expire even faster. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have quite a few files that I can no longer access except as raw byte streams because the applications that created them no longer exist or because the meta data information that controlled that creation is no longer available.
Even printing sh.., uh, stuff, out is pretty useless because most paper is acid based and turns to ash over a very short time. The inks are not much better.
I have books printed in the 17th century that are still quite readable (high rag content acid free paper,) and a 1901 Sears catalog (acid washed wood pulp paper,) that I accidentally put my thumb through in the late '80s.
Think in terms of data "movement" (i.e. backups) (Score:2)
You're supposed to keep backups, silly!
Redundant copies of the data, on other HDs or tape or any other media, will allow re-dupblication when one of the redundant pieces fails. Keep that up and your only worry is a catastrophic failure that kills all of your redundant pieces at once.
You reduce the chance of that, BTW, by trying to keep your backups in more than one place.
Now I grant you, no one does backups properly. At least, until after the first few times they get burned.
Eon-long sotrage options... (Score:5, Insightful)
I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography.... Even the blurry shots of the floor (Hey it might make a good background) Granted, CDROM's will be non-existant in 20 years.. but it's replacement will be here BEFORE it goes away.... so I transfer it... or my kids will or my grandchildren... Just like how I transferred my parent's and grandparents legacy media to current (Film, photos, Encode a Edison phonograph tube to mp3.... etc...)
It takes PEOPLE to make information survive... no magical device or media will.
Re:Eon-long storage options... (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in highschool, a friend of mine gave me a picture of her in the park. She was off center and some guy was in the background. Several times I considered taking scissors and cropping that guy out. After all, I didn't know him and he wasn't nearly as cute as she was. Fast forward a few years, and I'm scanning my pics and posting them to my site, and I see the picture of her. Only this time, I recognize the guy in the background. He's a friend of mine now. So you never know what'll be important or interesting later, and you don't always need to wait a few hundred years for your perception to change.
Abandonware (Score:2, Insightful)
The biggest problem with maintaining archives may be that some people actually want thier information to just dissapear.
Backups! (Score:2)
mum in the fine art and absolute neccesity of
making backups!
"Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it."
However, he does raise an interesting point. There
have been even more spectacular failures than the
Norwegian museum that he refers to; witness the BBC
in the UK's loss of much of their digital archive
due to not having any drives available to read the
optical media any more.
I can see that in 100 years all content that has not
been re-archived onto modern media will cease to exist.
What the long-term solution to this is, I have no idea!
Stone tablets would still seem to be the best way of
recording something for millenia.
How about (Score:2)
Call it the MPAA or Monty Python Archiving Association. All we need to do is figure out what made this century special and satirize it.
If you don't believe this will work try this experiment: Walk into a technical meeting and say in your best imitation voice "We are the knights who say...."
I guranteed you will get a "Neee!" from somewhere.
With enough people you could probably reconstruct the entire movie, or find one who has the whole thing memorized.
Don't think it will work, well "I fart in your general direction!"...damn, I did it again.
.
What about 'sentimental' data? (Score:2, Insightful)
How many people have grandparents who still have a box full of all of the letters they wrote each other when they were younger? OK, a few people might still write the occasional letter to each other, but this is really a thing of the past. And you can't compare the personal effort that goes into actually writing a letter with an e-mail. Just the fact that someone has actually gone to all the trouble to write the letter out makes it infinitely more satisfying when you read it.
How many people in (say) 20 years will have an actual photo album with real photos in it? How many people do you know now that have a photo album you can't view without turning on a computer?
It think it will be in 20+ years when the current digital-data generation are older that these things will really start to tell.
File formats are the core problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution is straightforward and well underway, courtesy of the internet and WWW: published open data formats. The only reason for using a proprietary format these days is the effort that software makers put us through to do otherwise. Have you gotten tired of dismissing MS Word's objections to the use of RTF yet?
When we just say no to software that uses anything but open published formats, we'll get the software we need.
Re:File formats are the core problem (Score:2, Informative)
for eternity. Burnable CD-ROMS might last 50 years
if you keep then in a dark, temperature controlled
vault. Pressed CDs will last rather longer but
eternity is not an option with this kind of storage.
Re:File formats are the core problem (Score:3, Informative)
I have an old 7-inch floppy with some TI software old it. I'm sure it's bit-rotted to oblivion by now, but even if it hadn't, I don't have the media reader to read it. And even if I did, I still don't know how the disk was formatted. Was it for CP/M, an early MS-DOS, what?
On encountering digital data, future archaeologists will have to (1) research past media recording technologies enough to build a reader (2) research (poorly documented) data formatting protocols so they can (3) write themselves a device driver and (4) read the media.
I pity the archaeologist who first has to rediscover EBCDIC.
Look at the big picture (Score:2)
Can Millipede save us? (Score:2, Interesting)
Millipede is such an incredible technology not only because of its ultra-high density, but because the data actually exists in a physical form, albiet on an incredibly tiny scale, unlike current hard drives, which just toss around magnetic charges. Magnets don't last forever, but you seal up a polymer film in a metal case, and it'll last pretty much forever.
IBM dropped their HDD division, but I don't think they'd even think about dropping millipede. This technology could very well be the future of long-term data storage.
I just hope it comes through in a pure format, and soon (without DRM).
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/2002
Digital Data - The end of Dark Ages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Our data storage needs have kept pace with data storage ability for some time now. I don't see this ending anytime soon. But it might, eventually. It stands to reason that there will come a time when we will have a want of things to store for all the space we have. I don't count on it in my lifetime, but it could happen.
The trick, then, is getting the data from here to there. How do we do it?
1. The written word is still the most important medium of human communication. Project Gutenberg is doing a bang-up job of digitizing AND distributing written works, and this is a project we should all support. I would also like to see a similar project with scientific journals being digitized (if not already) and widely distributed to universities, who can host them publicly or privately.
2. Someone suggested CDs, but these are impractical. CD-r's have a shelf life of 100 years, and CD-RW has even less. These could work as storage medium, but you would have to be diligent in keeping them up-to-date. What we really need is a physical storage method (like CDs) that have the capacity of magnetic storage media, like HDs.
3. Open file formats. It stands to reason that computers will always understand ASCII (or possibly UNICODE) text. It would not be difficult to append text-only information to the end of even very complex documents, that could be retreived even if the file format itself was no longer known. xml-based file formats do this to a degree, but it depends on the universitality of the
4. All of this is useless if we ourselves are not diligent in keeping up with our digital information. In the Middle Ages, copying an old, worn-out parchment or scroll could take weeks, even months. Now it's possible to do it in a fraction of a second, so there's no reason we shouldn't.
I currently keep my important data (emails, writings, website) in the following locations: My hard drive, a backup file on another hardrive, a CD-RW, a CD-R (which I change/update every six months or so) The server at my school, and the my webserver which is offsite. I personally would like to see off-planet massive storage, but until storage space exceeds storage demand, we will always be faced with the question of "What is important enough to backup?"
so any recommendations for us Joe 6-packs? (Score:4, Interesting)
As such, does anyone have any recommendations for average people like me out there who have data that is very important to them, but for whom corporate measures like commercial data backup services just aren't practical? Is there a better practice I can do than what I'm doing already? How about specially designed long life CDRs? Does such a thing exist?
Try Tape Drives (Score:2)
If it's worth saving, it'll probably be saved (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I've been saying all along.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Moreover, the advancement of HD tech makes it almost certain that when one fails in a year, I won't be able to get an exact replacement to reload it from the RAID.
Does anyone know of a PRACTICAL way to back up 80 Gig's of info? AHSay.com offers online backups, but the initial backup would take weeks through my ADSL modem, and then incrementals would be pretty much useless. I suppose I could use DVD-RW, but at 4.7 Gig a disk, we're talking 20ish disks, at several hours a piece. And doing incremental backups that way is a nightmare. It seems that my only real option is to use something like a MonsterTape backup storage device, but systems with 80Gig capacities and up START at $4000 a piece, and the tapes are 80 bucks a piece. With 80 gig drives available for $129 bucks (Pricewatch [pricewatch.com]), it doesn't seem like a good option.
Don't bother. (Score:2)
The digital dark age is about to begin... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, sure things are stored on HD's, but they are easly copied to new media... such as DVD-roms, etc. Any technology today has to be able to take data currently written to a HD.
But here comes "Digital Rights Management" or DRM. a hardware and software based double punch to our fair use rights. This is what could prevent us from making back-ups, keep us from moving to new forms of media.
It is the beginning of the digital dark age.
--T
Pretty ridiculous... (Score:4, Insightful)
So yes, 99.99% of all information in existence today will probaly be lost 1000 years from now. The remaining
For starters, we still publish about as many books as any other society in history. There are books available on literally every topic available, and most of them have thousands of copies in circulation. So imagine that 99.9% of all books are nuked, chances are the majority of those books will still survive, and historians only need 1 copy to make use of it.
Finally, this article massively underestimates how easy it is to preserve digital information. 10 years from now, terrabyte hard drives will be commonplace, and no doubt second-generation DVD-R's will hold tens of gigabytes of data. All you have to do is copy those files en masse to the latest format every 10 or 20 years, and you've preserved the information. One person can do that in his spare time quite easily. Furthermore, file formats aren't *that* hard to reverse-engineer. Even if the world forgot what a Microsoft Word document looked like (which is extremely unlikely) they should be able to look at the raw data and figure it out well enough to at least read the plaintext. And I doubt we'll ever forget what ASCII means.
As for people losing their personal correspondance-- perhaps 99.99% of people will lose their email correspondance at some point in their lives. So in a nation of 300 million people, that leaves only 30,000 complete email correspondances for future historians to peruse. Imagine how much we'd know about Greek or Roman times if we had the complete correspondance of 30,000 average Greek or Roman citizens...
In conclusion, I think quite the opposite is true. Historians 1000 years from now will have more material than they can possibly process about the early 21st century. The trick will be in assimilating all that information into something useful, not finding enough to work with.
No way! Digital storage lasts much better (Score:3, Insightful)
If digital storage was like paper storage this would be an issue but the truth is digital storage is unique in 2 ways:
1. You can make infinite perfect copies
2. The storage capacity grows exponentially over time.
I still have papers I wrote 15 years ago. The 20 Meg 5.25" harddrive that they were originally stored was trash 10 years ago along with 3 or 4 other drives that they lived on over the years and yet my papers remain. They remain because I wanted to keep them (and I'm good about protecting my data.) They are on a completely different filesystem (EXT3) on a completely different operating system and yet I can still get to them, read them and print them out. They are now on a RAID 5 array that is backed up to a separate drive with all my other important data.
In the article he states about physical things "Mostly, stuff lasts". That is just not true. How many of those documents that we printed out back in the early 90's before everything was email based are still around? I know several people who have all their email going back 5-10 years. It's simply much easier to keep digital stuff around.
Most people upgrade to a new machine and bring their data over with them. The drives fail but the files that people care about stay. Crashes can be devastating and people certainly do lose data but the same thing can be said about fire in the physical world. Keeping 2 digital copies of important stuff makes it hard to lose it. If you lose one copy, make another one. The odds of losing both before you can make a new copy are very slim.
It's also much easier to keep digital things organized and search through them.
I think digital things in general will always have better lasting power than paper things. Internet based backup services will make this much more so in the coming years. For a few dollars a year you can have all your important files stored somewhere off site on redundant media. Try doing that with paper?
What a piece of reactionary fluff (Score:4, Insightful)
Jesus, it's not like every hard drive on the planet is going to die simultaneously at an unknown future date....and in the meantime, new hard drives are manufactured and new storage media ara invented, did it ever occur to him that people might migrate their data along the way?
Horrible, horrible article.