When Data Disappears

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

by nsfmc • 15 years ago

24 11 15 years ago

nknight• 15 years ago

Sigh This again? Seems like the press does this story once a month.

"If you don’t have a copy of WordPerfect 2 around, you’re out of luck."

Dunno about WP2, but my copy of LibreOffice purports to open WordPerfect files of indeterminate vintage, and there are various other formats in there that I know go back 20+ years, and I'll be very surprised if ODF 1.0 readers disappear between now and eternity.

And of course, for us English-only types, plain ASCII files work as well now as they did in the 60s. I expect UTF-8 will likewise work at least as well in 2050 as it does now.

Physical media degradation/obsolescence is the only thing I would worry about, and then not that much for anything that's already been brought into the Internet age.

Storing lossless encodings of every film ever made might be a challenge, but text? No. A little care is all it takes, and I do mean a little.

Dylan16807• 15 years ago

Right, as long as you store it in a format that you choose for compatibility then text will be fine on that front. Even if you don't have a proper ODF reader it's still a zip archive with text files inside. And UTF-8 is easy to decode.

The problem as I see it is defending from two possible problems at the same time: having the media fail, and being hacked. Some kind of internet-based storage is great for the former, lousy for the latter. But with a bit of effort you can combine online distributed storage with a closet or two full of hard drives and tapes.

jcn• 15 years ago

While the media may do stories like this often, I feel like the question is often more along the lines of "how do we save all of the bits!?" and less about other, broader ways we can think about saving the information, as opposed to just saving the data.

For me, the more relevant part of this story was:

"By some estimates, that’s nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Even if we had perfectly stable storage, could we ever have enough to preserve everything? The short answer is no — but only because we’re trying to replicate the practices used for decades to maintain paper archives."

srl• 15 years ago

Yuck. She claims that what we're doing to preserve old data isn't working[1], so the solution is to emulate what vintage video game fans do - keep circulating the same old games and pouring a great deal of time into preserving them and (rarely) making marginal improvements. Not a very radical idea, given that that's already what people do, well outside video game groups. (The torrent/"piracy" society is the most obvious example.)

The other idea she has is that experts in the field should make decisions about what to keep and what to ditch. Aside from her example (curators to decide what data is good and what data is bad? Have you never taken a science class?), this is a good idea - and an obvious one.

[1] A dubious claim that she doesn't bother to back up with any specific and correct examples.

(<flame necessary="no">This is what happens when english professors write about technology.</flame> )

sehugg• 15 years ago

But over time, emulation becomes unwieldy: because the host systems for which emulators are designed will themselves become obsolete, emulators must eventually be moved to new computer platforms — emulators to run emulators, ad infinitum.

Has there ever been a shortage of developers willing to write new emulators? A better argument would be that the usability degrades since the emulated environment is from a different era and might not map to current tech (e.g. iPad version of a keyboard-driven app).

zandorg• 15 years ago

In 1998, I wrote MIDI support into Frodo (the C64 emulator). Later, my suggestion got the developers of UAE (the Amiga emulator) to implement MIDI support in UAE.

So it is possible to recreate the environment by passing the MIDI data back and forth between Windows and the program running on UAE.

The same goes for mouse support, graphics tablets, etc etc.

gwern• 15 years ago

> Has there ever been a shortage of developers willing to write new emulators?

A good usable emulator, with all the bugs and corner-cases ironed out? I've read the occasional MAME blog post or documentation about the gory details, and all I remember is a mounting sense of horror and gratitude that the MAME devs were doing the work rather than me.

There's basically only one MAME project, BTW.

zdw• 15 years ago

Emulation should be the last resort for things that are so dependent on their environment that they need an exact replica going forward. Video games are great examples of this.

For everything else, such as the collected notes of a writer, or musical notation, etc. the goal should be to transform it into a well understood format (for example, images of handwritten pages in PNG format, rather than the physical pages themselves) and keep that replica as an archive.

Also, good use of integrity preservation tech is key - keeping copies of the digital files with hashes of their contents so you know they're not corrupted, and moving to new physical media periodically, or distributing the content so that all the copies aren't lost.

cek2• 15 years ago

"The Cloud" has radically changed this situation. Sure, it will always be possible to accidentally delete or corrupt something, and, yes, there are formats that will be unreadable in the future, but the fact that

- ingress to the cloud AND - storage in the cloud

have costs rapidly approaching $zero mean that storing duplicate copies is already almost automatic.

I have a stack of 5.25" and 3.5" floppies with all my high-school & college papers and code on them. They may or may not be readable today. But EVERYTHING I have done in the last 15 or so years is on multiple hard disks both in my home and in the cloud. I did not have to work too hard to make that happen.

Today it's even more automatic. Dropbox, Amazon S3, Amazon Cloud Drive, Flickr, cloud based email, all mean just about everything I do/have digitally is preserved in a far more accessible and stable way than ever was previously possible.

watmough• 15 years ago

Sure, whilst you're alive, your data is being preserved and transported to new ways to store it.

But what about when it's your children and grandchildren? My father has most of my grandmother's personal effects and pictures.

Can you bet that your grandchildren will be able to access and recognize your data, pictures and music.

As an example, we've already seen one DRM protected storage system fail in the market, the ironically named 'PlayForSure', any guarantee that others will survive? What about archaic image formats? What about 40 years from now?

cek2• 15 years ago

I don't understand your first point. My "upon my death" file provides credentials.

Your second point is interesting but I think this discussion is about personal information and, at least as far as I can see, people don't DRM that.

When Data Disappears

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