Most Digital Content Not Stable 353
brunes69 writes "The CBC is running an article profiling the problems with archiving digital data in New Brunswick's provincial archives. Quote from the story: 'I've had audio tape come into the archives, for example, that had been submerged in water in floods and the tape was so swollen it went off the reel, and yet we were able to recover that. We were able to take that off and dry it out and play it back. If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted'. Given the difficulties with preserving digital data, is it really the medium we should be using for archival purposes?"
That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Multiple identical copies? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the messanger, not the message (Score:4, Insightful)
But what you got off the tape... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every Superman has his Kryptonite (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:1, Insightful)
Precisely (Score:3, Insightful)
As you said, the great thing about digital data is that is can be replaced cheaply, perfectly, and spread around. It's resilience isn't in the one copy lasting 1000 years, it is in having copies everywhere, so no even short of nuclear war can eliminate them all, and maybe not even then.
This also is the response to the other big cry-wolf thing, "What happens when the data is in a format that's too old???!!11one" The answer is we just keep copying it to new formats. I have digital copies of papers that I wrote in high school. They were written on an old copy or Works for Windows 3.1 and usually saved to floppy. I don't have a floppy any more but it isn't a problem. I long ago transferred them to a harddrive and I just keep transferring them to new drives when I get them. I also periodically load the old documents in to whatever my current word processor is, convert them, and re-save them as a new format.
So the parent is completely correct. Because of digital's ability to be perfectly copied, and especially with the Internet's ability to distribute those copies to anywhere in the world, it can have a permanence far above and beyond analogue. The individual copies might be fragile, but get a few thousand, or million of them and you'll be hard pressed to get rid of them all.
Re:Multiple identical copies? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also I'm certain for every analog horror story there is a digital lucky story (and vice versa). Not to mention digital encodings usually have some kind of redundancy. A small scrach does nothing but the same scratch on an lp forever destroys some part of the track. I wont even go into the magic of data restoration (which the author ignores). There's really no 'tough medium for the ages' out there that can do it all. Just complaints and blind-luck stories.
Umm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stone tablets (Score:3, Insightful)
Mission-critical archives and backups (Score:3, Insightful)
A combination of multiple sets of magneto-optical and tape backups maintained in separate locations, all temperature and humidity-controlled environments should easily yield 25~30 years shelf life, which guarantees that by then we'll hopefully have found better long-term options to transfer these to.
I am transferring most of my 15 to 20-year old audio DAT tapes digitally with no problems. Good brand-name CD-R's (like Tayo-Yuden) kept out of the light and at a steady temperature seem fairly resilient so far, but there has been batches which over time have developed 'rot' or layer oxydation, which sometimes renders them partially or wholly unusable.
DLT tapes are so far the most trouble-free type of media I have encountered, but with only 10 years to go back on, not sure that is accurate.
Z.
Re:Multiple identical copies? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's already happened/happening. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing an important element here. As you move along in time, the volume of data that must be converted to the format du jour only gets bigger and bigger.
For a single person, it's probably not too bad. I, too, have pretty much everything I ever wrote since I first got a computer, and every few years I've committed to rolling the whole thing onto new media. So I've gone from offline backups on floppies, to Zip disks (in retrospect a mistake), to CDs, to DVD-R, and now to DVD+R (the -R discs were crappy and I've since heard that +R is a superior format anyway). This isn't much trouble, because the amount of data I have to backup hasn't really grown that much faster than the data density of available media. I'm probably up to a couple of DVDs for the stuff I really, really care about, maybe a binder if I include all the photos and video.
But what's a basic Saturday-afternoon copy-and-burn job for an individual is a Sisyphean task for a large government agency or library, particularly one who is constantly generating new content. I've seen places that could barely keep up with archiving the stuff they were producing, much less roll their vast archives forward onto new media. So they'd have vaults of hard drives, sitting next to DLT cassettes, next to IBM 3480, next to racks of old half-inch open-reel tapes. Probably back in some dark corner there were piles of punched cards; it really wouldn't surprise me. The problem of data loss due to unreadable formats isn't some abstract 'maybe,' it's already happened in a lot of places (but nobody really wants to talk about it, so it mostly gets buried and whatever's on the tapes gets written off).
The reason why there's so much interest in preservable formats is because while it may not be strictly impossible to constantly roll old backups and archives forward, it's very hard, and requires vast amounts of effort and expense. If you have a backup that's being written into a format that you know is going to be readable for a long time, even if it's more expensive to write initially, you can save a lot of money and time down the road by not having to copy it forward as often.
People may get a little shrill when they're talking about these issues, but they're quite real.
Re:have people already forgotten? (Score:1, Insightful)
So You've Lost a $38 Billion File (Score:3, Insightful)
Chappies in New Brunswick:
From an earlier /. article:
Quick someone tell the author of: 'So You've Lost a $38 Billion File [slashdot.org]' that everything is alright! New Brunswick had data that was submerged in water, tape so swollen it was off the reel; they still managed to recover it.
And don't come out with that: 'Polar Bear ate the backup tape' excuse again!
Re:That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'm 1/8th Native American (but 7/8ths White) if that counts for anything, but this is always overblown. Whites/europeans came in and conquered the land. That's what people have done throughout all of recorded history. The Romans Conquered the Greeks, the Normans conquered the Saxons, etc. The list goes on and on. The case has ALWAYS been that if some other nation wanted your land and you couldn't stand up to them in a military confrontation, then you were gonna loose that land.
Now I'm not saying that it's right or justified or anything, but European conquest into North America is always vilified much more than any other tale of conquest, and I'm not sure why.
Re:It's the messanger, not the message (Score:3, Insightful)
Those audio tapes were "recoverable", but I bet they didn't sound all that great. Good enough to be understood, but nowhere near the original quality. An analog signal that is "garbled" is still usable.
If there had been *digital* data on those tapes, then it's pretty likely that enough of the data had been corrupted that the files would have been *unusable*. Once the bits are gone, they're gone. Throw in the fact that there no guaranteed that the encoding and file formats (never mind encryption) we use today will be in use even 20 years from now, and you start to realize how ephemeral digital data is.
Re:That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
Ballsy words for an Anonymous Coward. Hopefully you'd stick to them if your hometown were invaded.
Re:Multiple identical copies? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can argue the merits of existing analog archives staying analog but what about the rest of it?
how did we get so far offtopic? (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said. What's done is done. It should be remembered so we learn from those horrible mistakes. It shouldn't be a constant source of guilt to be used against people that had no part in it. The same goes for slavery, genocide and all the other ignorant suffering we've inflicted on each other.
Re:That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
As a person who loves to study European antiquity I would point out some flaws in this thinking...
1. When the Romans conquered the Greeks they actually adopted Greek culture and didn't kill off the Greeks.
2. When the Normans conquered the Saxons they didn't kill off the Saxons nor really conquered their land as much as just intermarried with them (Hence Anglo-Saxon Culture)
The only whole sale Genocides that history can come up with is the Crusaders massacre of Jerusalem (which wasn't really as much as hatred of Muslims as it was starving Europeans killing off everyone in the city regardless of religion out of rage of having to starve in the desert for several months) and then the Mongol sack of Baghdad which wasn't over so much as land, but out of spite of the execution of Mongol diplomats (considering they burned and salted the lands made the "take your lands" point of conquering sort of a non-issue).
The genocide and seizure of lands in this scale was never really seen before until the colonization of Americas. It wasn't as much as the Indians could not defend them as much as it was that the westerners thought they were subhuman.
Which sadly we saw again in the European theatre in WW2.
Re:That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying we should have reparations or anything like that. I think what's done is done, by people who are long dead, and those of us that had nothing to do with it shouldn't feel guilty about what happened. But we also shouldn't lie about it.
Roman & Greeks != European & Native Americ (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's nothing, think of DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
Um. Slashdot itself refers to you as an 'Anonymous Coward', ostensibly in an effort to incite account registration while allowing anonymous posting.
And I'll admit myself to having a bit of a bias against ACs. Sometimes they're insightful, but most of the time when you see 'Anonymous Coward' in the byline, you can guess you're going to see something stupid or trollish.
So, yeah. Statistically, 'Anonymous Coward' means 'Troll'. Just 'cos you aren't one doesn't change the statistics.
Re:Roman & Greeks != European & Native Ame (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a pretty fine hair to split between genocide and ethnic cleansing. What is the real difference between successful ethnic cleansing and unsuccessful genocide?
I do believe I have friends that have some native american ancestry...
All this means is that the genocide was not complete.
The Nazis attempted a genocide against the Jews but did not complete the job. If they had started out simply with a mission of ethnic cleansing and achieved the same result would it have been a better thing?
Re:TV DVD recorders (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, who watches Commercials anymore??