They’re using shellac records, not plastic ones, and the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired.
As Zsofia and others have pointed out, preserving any medium is a tricky task. Something like 50% of films from the era before sound was introduced are believed to be lost, and films are still disappearing everyday. NASA has the original filmstock from the Apollo missions stored in vats of liquid nitrogen to try and preserve it as long as possible. AFAIK, they’ve only been thawed out once since being put into storage, and that was for the film For All Mankind.
The issue that Sunspace talks about, isn’t that big of a deal, IMHO. After all, you can find Timex Sinclair computer emulators on the web, so all you really need to do is find some pimply faced geek who’s bored, and he’ll figure out how to get the thing going again.
BobT, you’re probably right about the Superbowl tapes being erased. That happened with old episodes of The Tonight Show and the BBC did that with a bunch of Doctor Who episodes as well.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.
Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.
The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records.
The headline is a journo classic: “Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind”
That’s impressive. Prediction: It will not last 13.8 GY, unless it can survive being inside the sun. Incidentally, that number is very suspicious, being too precise and also being the current age of the universe.
Now how will they store the instructions on how to read it?
When discussing long-term custody of data, one must also ask whether the custody is active or passive. It doesn’t matter if CDs only last 30 years, for instance, if you copy the data over to new disks every 5. Or over to whatever the new standard medium is, if the standard medium changes. And the new media tend to have much higher capacities than older ones, so it’s not that big of a chore to copy over all of your old data. About the only requirement for this is that the data be digital, so as to be copied faithfully, and that it be in a machine-readable format.
On the other hand, it also requires that someone keep obtaining the new media, and installing the hardware to read and write it, and so on. If the institution that’s doing this goes kaput, without a successor, then your data dies shortly after.
Of course. I have a dozen or so devices in my house that can read JPEGs. I also have tens of thousands of JPEGs. There are still plenty of utilities out there that can convert IFF files that were used by a minority computer platform two or three decades ago. With probably a few billion JPEGs created every day, that format is going to outlive all of us.
But you are right that selecting the right format is important. Applications such as Word can’t open files created with (much) earlier versions of the same program. Obviously it’s much worse for software that doesn’t exist anymore.
Exactly. Create-and-forget is not a workable approach for an individual when it comes to digital data. Just copy your data periodically. Obviously you also need several copies, AND check whether the files are still intact when copying it, or you may end up keeping corrupt versions.
Analog (paper) copies are good, too.
Until about a decade ago, we used interchangeable media such as magnetic tapes, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs. Those have the issue that you need a drive to read them. CDs and DVDs are probably going to be around for a long time, but you need to make fresh copies once in a while. Then you’ll find out that copying media takes forever. Not only are these limited by how fast they can spin, but you also have to put them in the drive and take them out.
So what you’ll want to do is use high density drives. Harddisks are good: they’re fast, have huge capacity, and the lowest price per gigabyte. They also keep getting better in all these respects, unlike interchangeable media that need to be compatible with existing drives. An alternative is flash drives, USB or SD. Those are solid state and very small.
So what I’d do in your situation: keep everything on two HDDs (a full copy on each) that live in different places, and then have an extra copy on SD cards. Replace each copy every five years, whenever you run out of room or when the ports needed to read them start going out of fashion.
What I actually do do: keep all my photos on my computer’s internal drive and have three backups on external HDDs, one of which I keep in another city.
as one other member noted … depends how long the media is intended to last. doubtful anything is truly infallible. just last week was watching one documentary on how extremists in iraq are demolishing any and every relic. so … that there is one scenario … paranoia and extremism can quickly sabotage even the most secure faculty.
nature also has a way of dealing with anything of a permanent nature … floods 'n volcano 'n earthquake come to mind … along with objects falling from the heavens. while keeping the archives at absolute-zero (-460ºf) and within perpetual vacuum … that environment needs constant power to retain dispensation.
personally, i’d suggest underground vault … 1½ miles beneath the lunar surface. yes … the moon.
Old definition: water in air with heat and winds doing stuff
2, New definition: either molecules arranged in certain magnetic patterns or route of electricity through tiny, tiny circuits.
I’d guess that, as they stand now, both ‘old school’ and ‘new school’ 'Clouds" have the same archival properties - none.
How many drives (HDD) does Google burn out every day? 100’s, if not 1000’s.
This will quickly get into the “Transporter Problem”.
The whole point of a data cloud is that you don’t care about the individual drives. Yes, they have to be replaced. And they are. The data remains, and that’s the part you care about.
The current tactic for archiving data is pretty much what it has been for the last few decades.
You keep on copying it.
Data storage densities have risen so fast that the cost of storing everything that has gone before each time a new generation of storage has come along is a minor part of the use of the new storage. SO, so long as you have a business case for funding the next generation of storage, the old data gets new storage for essentially free.
Cloud storage is no different. Where you see some changes is in the question of tape versus disk and in-between solutions - stopped or slow disks.
But, no doubt. Post zombie apocalypse, Google, Amazon etc, will be so much dust, and there will be scant chance a new technical society woul dhave much luck with what was left.
Archival formats are not so hard. Use ascii, don’t use proprietary binary formats, and don’t compress anything. Store on sequential media with a simple and obvious table of contents. Then the problem of reading the documents is no more complex than a brain teaser puzzle.
The fempto-second laser trick of etching into glass is very neat. I do wonder what the data rate is. The auto-focusing nature of the pulse is one of the more bizarre tricks of light. I had only seen them used for eye surgery and some tricks blasting selected bit of cells. This quite a nice new use. But they will need to get megabits per second out of the device to make it worthwhile.
Well, Google has no problem discontinuing all kinds of services, so I wouldn’t know about that first part.
But the real problem is that you have absolutely no control over your data anymore. What if you get locked out of your account? Good luck getting someone at Google on the phone to solve the problem. While someone else is perusing your data.
And simple restatement or re-indexing of the same contemporaneous information performed unconsciously and unwittingly shows itself as necessary to the individual members of a population unfamiliar with the recording medium, and does add a modicum of redundancy within a channel which itself, when recorded, provides redundancy.
Although it’s always better to have more drawers in which to eventually find stuff.
Fortunately physicists aren’t in charge of data storage protocols.
You can copy digital data as often as you like without degradation. If at some point, you notice that something bad happened to your data while it was stored, transmitted or processed, simply retry the operation. If that doesn’t help, retry with your backup copy.
