digital preservation
a.k.a. backing things up.

A few people have posted about the fear of losing digital data. Here's a scary bit of info that I've mentioned in passing before, but it bears repeating because it scared the bejesus out of me: digital information lasts about five years.

Aye, within five years of creating those cutsey photos of your gerbil/goat/child/other half's genitals your digital data will need to be migrated (e.g. moved to a new computer) or updated (so it can be accessed via newer versions of software). Backing it up on CDs/DVDs is not foolproof or futureproof - they disintegrate quite quickly. Think also of the quality of what you create and how capture technology has come on leaps and bounds in the last few decades.

If you want to make sure your digital photos will last, make hardcopy prints of them. Digital photography is convenient and quick and has opened the market hugely to amateurs, but there's a reason the pros still use film (generally better quality being the main one).

One nice way of preserving things is sticking them online and hoping that dissemination will do the trick, or that the servers won't disappear.

If that doesn't alarm you, have a slight panic at the data crisis that could well emerge in the not-to-distant future. We're recording a helluva lot of information - written (takes up a small space), photos (slightly more), video (too much for my liking). Everyone is creating content these days (and the frickin' BBC website and the suchlike actively encourage this shit from their illiterate, opinionated wannabe contributers). Just how much content can we store?

Five years 'til digital obsolescence was the figure calculated a few years ago. It's possibly even less now. The more disposable our belongings become, the more disposable the information becomes.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:12, 41 replies)

Hmm
Er.....

Crap.

*Remembers hasn't backed stuff up for, well, a while.*
(PenguinOfDeath is Scottish, and most likely angry, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:17, closed)

Interesting arguement
I agree with a lot of it.
But I think that any forecasts made are fairly shakey, purely down to the fact that digital storage technology is advancing at such a rate.

Give it a couple of years and solid state memory will be the storage medium of choice.

You can get a 2Gb card that's half the size of a second-class stamp, for a very low price. It won't be long before the a 200Gb card the size of a credit card (or smaller) is a common feature.

So whilst the size of documents, photos and videos increases, due to better and better resolution, The rate at which storage technology is developing will out-strip it.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:19, closed)

^
maybe... but maybe not. There aren't any guarantees to that as yet, so do you want to risk it...?
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:22, closed)

Yeah, I'll risk it.
I've got things well backed up though.

And anything I want printed, is printed out as big and as high quality as I can afford at the time.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:26, closed)

remember Kaol
storage media break, e.g. YOUR COPY OF GTA4!
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:27, closed)

I think we should all go back to 35mm wind on cameras
waiting 2 weeks for Boots to cock up the developing, giving the photos a quick look and then stuffing the envelope in the drawer with all the other envelopes which have spat all the negatives out and will never be matched up.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:29, closed)

They do break
But my personal files, eg. artwork and videos, are backed up, a lot.

To the point of intense paranoia.

Got my copy of GTA replaced by the way, had a couple of sleepless nights playing it.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 10:30, closed)

hmmm.
I know magnetic media (ie tapes, disks etc) fade over time and become corrupt. But I was always under the impression that optical storage such as CDs, DVDs could be stored for many many many many many years without any problems. Infact I have some CDs from a backup I did 10 years ago and they still load ok.
(Miggyman, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:22, closed)

^ I read a paper
A while back about a fairly common kind of fungus that had been found growing between the plastic and the foil parts of CD-Rs.
Turns out it was eating the dye, as it had a digestable carbon-based molecule in it.

So... Yeah, keep your back-up CDs somewhere dry.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:28, closed)

back in the early days
of CDs and DVDs, manufacturers were promising 50-100 years, but these days it's more commonly one or two years. Oxidation, chemical reactions, temperature changes, sunlight, scratches and fingerprints are all very damaging. A lot of the cheap storage media sold today are pretty low quality. It seems you have to shell out for the good stuff, and even then it's not foolproof, not at all.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:32, closed)

Yeah...
"chemical reactions, temperature changes, sunlight, scratches and fingerprints are all very damaging."

And fungus. Don't forget those spore-y bastards.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:33, closed)

^
*adds "and Kaol's mushrooms"*
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:36, closed)

Without wishing to sound too flippant
- But this will sound flippant anyway -

We're all going to die at some point in the future, someone else will simply have to chuck it all away at a later date.

It's all ephemeral ultimately.

As much as I'd like to think that someone somewhere will always cherish my short stories, my novella and other writings, even my photographs and whatnot....
ultimately it's all food for the worms.



Apologies for sounding depressing.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:37, closed)

^
it's not depressing, I agree!

I can't find half the exam papers I set last year on my old Windows machine, but I recently came across a thin papery book of godawful poetry I'd written as a heartbroken teen proto-emo.

I will not be sorry to lose either when I die.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:44, closed)

Preserving digital data.
One way of doing it is to make a backup of your CDs/DVDs. Periodically, you check both copies of your media, and if any contain read-errors, you make a copy of the good copy and turn the bad copy into a psychedelic frisbee. If you're worried about both copies going bad at the same time, make a third copy and store it in a far away place. One way to do this is to copy the entire medium to your hard-drive and check for read-errors, but I'm wondering if there's a program that just checks the integrity of the medium without making a copy?

I've heard that professionally produced CD-ROMs are supposed to last in the 50-100 year range, but CD-Rs about 5. Not sure about DVDs or BDs.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:44, closed)

I agree with Kaol,
considering that in 1968 one of, if not the first itself, 1kb computers was made. It was absolutely huge as every single bit was an individual magnet... Now, as Kaol says, you can get 2gb thingy mabobbys the size of half a stamp. We're creating bigger stuff in smaller packages by the day, we'll always be able to keep ahead of it imo. Well, atleast, as long as I'm alive anyway, and that's all that matters, right? :)
(Belgaer is, Wed 14 May 2008, 11:52, closed)

@Belgaer
Exactly.
More people should agree with me, I'm the future.

I have a 4Gb USB stick on my keyring, and I'm starting to feel that it's not big enough. I got it for £12.

A couple of years ago the same kind of thing would have been a hundred pounds or more.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:00, closed)

Chickenlady's post reminds me
The last time I saw my grandma, she showed me a poem written about her by the shopkeeper of the corner shop she used to visit in the last place she lived. The shopkeeper died when I was about 6 (early 80s).

While in the grand scale of things, the poem as seen from an objective viewpoint does not have any merits, but as I remember that shopkeeper from when I was a kid, and because my grandma is still alive, I can see the great significance it has. Once my grandma dies, the poem will instantly become a relic from a bygone age. As part of the youngest generation in my to have remembered the shopkeeper, then once I myself die, it will lose its significance entirely (unless my sister also remembers this shopkeeper too). Would my own children also want to preserve the piece of paper it’s written on, make a digital backup or just let it be eaten by worms?
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:06, closed)

Despite me saying that it's all ephemeral and we'll all die anyway
yesterday I bought on impulse/in panic a 120gb HDD external hard drive. I'm now worrying that I've purchased the wrong bit of kit.


Yes, the wrong bit of kit to preserve my precious photographs (which I rarely look at), music collection (which I could torrent anytime), all my current (and most recent) scribblings (which would be no great loss to the world of literature).

As someone once said to me and it comes to mind here in my case...You can't polish a turd.

But I can keep it safe.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:08, closed)

@ Madamepoulet
Look through your photos, pick out twenty or so that you think are the best, and get them printed.

Trust me, they'll mean a lot more then.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:17, closed)

@ Mistaspakkaman
I'm sure I've mentioned this before and someone questioned the reference...I've found it now...

Sartre talks about this idea of being dead and forgotten (annihilated) once everyone has forgotten you....

"Those dead who have not been able to be saved and transported to the boundaries of the concrete past of a survivor are not past; they along with their pasts are annihilated." Being and Nothingness, J-P Sartre, 1943

So once everyone who remembers you has died it's almost as if you never existed.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:17, closed)

scribblings
If you save your text-files as plain text and do not compress them, then if the worse comes to the worse and your files become corrupted, you can salvage plain text just by using a hex-editor that can cope with bad sectors. You can easily sort out out-of-order sectors and fragmented files this way. For non-geeks, read: "there is hope!"
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:18, closed)

@ kaol
Funnily enough, I much prefer to occasionally take proper photos with a 35mm SLR and frame those prints. The digital stuff (even if it is DSLR and reasonably good pics) does tend to just get chucked into the virtual tip that is my hard drive. Mainly I think because the sheer volume of photos lessens their worth in some strange way for me.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:20, closed)

"So once everyone who remembers you has died it's almost as if you never existed."
That's why you've gotta do something of epic proportions of strangeness at least once a month.

If you become annecdote or urban legend, you'll never die.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:20, closed)

There
Is absolutely no way that we'll run out of storage. Not in million years. Disks just keep getting smaller and denser (1 TB disks are common now and 500 gig is the norm. ).

I, personally, have about 5TB of storage. A few years ago that would have been the entire storage for a data center.

Nah. Our data's safe.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:24, closed)

But to be honest
I'm not that bothered about being remembered.

So long as I can live a quiet and mostly happy life (which I do) then I'm content.


Obviously if I'm picked to go on "Britain's got Big Fame Idol Brother Academy" so I can perform my Dance of the 65 Veils with monkeys then it's a different story.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:24, closed)

@Kaol
I'm sure the contents of the b3ta server will continue to exist in some form or other. Even if it's only on archive.org.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:27, closed)

This may be a little way off the point,
But this all reminds me of a minor character from the comic series Preacher.

Some guy got kicked off the US space program, and went mad.
He got himself a huge area of desert for very little money, and went about dynamiting "FUCK YOU!" in huge letter into the ground.

Obviously, the crew of the shuttle saw it, and had a "what the fuck" moment.

That's the kind of thing that I mean by leaving your mark.

By the same token, if you kill someone, in the eyes of the public that makes you a thug.

If you kill twenty people, become a serial killer, you'll go down in history. People will write songs.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:34, closed)

but
by 2010 there's going to be an estimated exabyte (10^18 bytes) of data online. Fine and dandy, but how exactly are you going to find what you need...? Information only really exists if you can access it. That means annotating and cataloguing your data efficiently or hoping that someone will come up with some highly efficient automated metadata-generation storage and retrieval.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:37, closed)

Kaol
you read Preacher? Wahey, I adore you more!
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:37, closed)

Of course.
Could you possibly adore me more?
Short of offering yourself up to me, I mean.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:47, closed)

^
why, if I were 10 years younger..!

(Edit: and a goat)
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:51, closed)

Haha!
It's ok, some of the face creams out there can actually turn back the ageing process, it must be true, I heard it on the adverts.

I'm not into goats, that's Al and Burt.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:56, closed)

Perhaps once we're all dead
it would become trendy for people to randomly browse through old content online and who knows, someone may discover our inane wibblings and we'd be bringing a smile to their faces from beyond the grave.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Wed 14 May 2008, 12:57, closed)

I'd rather deliver a punch in the gob from beyond the grave.









I have no idea why I'm being so testy today.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 14 May 2008, 13:02, closed)

I'd rather
Become a feared serial killer.
EDIT: I say become...
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 13:04, closed)

*worries*
you'd let me live though, wouldn't you Kaol? I mean, we have shared tastes in comics n'stuff.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 13:20, closed)

Preacher
anyone got an amazon (or other) link ? thx
(bazmorningstar efil4nat3b, Wed 14 May 2008, 13:27, closed)

here ya go
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/ang_new/webprojects_erg/RoadCult/preacher/preacher.htm
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 14 May 2008, 13:31, closed)

I'll let you live
But I might cut off your leg, and eat it.

/Preacher.
( Cawl, Wed 14 May 2008, 14:08, closed)

Exabyte of the stuff? Probably.
I'm one of the techy (no, not tetchy) guys who helps sell this stuff and the same customers that used to buy a few hundred gig of disk a couple of years ago are now buying tens of terabytes. 90% of the time they don't even have a clue what that data is, let alone if it's worth keeping. There is software around to help with the searching/archiving etc. but software doesn't have lots of flashy lights so they're not as interested in that.
( SteamedCleaner, Wed 14 May 2008, 14:22, closed)