HOW LONG WILL YOUR DATA BE READABLE?

Brad Reagan wrote the following in an article title The Digital Age, Popular Mechanics, December 2006 (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4201645.html). I have been saying this for at least 15 years, but I was a voice crying in the wilderness until about 5 years ago when I first saw others worrying not about the life of storage media, but of storage technology. Perhaps if this issue is raised in such a well-respected scientific magazine, someone will pay attention.

“The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of future readability. As technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Will an entire era of human history be lost?

“One irony of the Digital Age is that archiving has become a more complex process than it was in the past. You not only have to save the physical discs, tapes and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and software of the future. ‘Most people haven't recognized that digital stuff is encoded in some format that requires software to render it in a form that humans can perceive,’ Rothenberg says. ‘Software that knows how to render those bits becomes obsolete. And it runs on computers that become obsolete.’

“In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new ‘book.’ It was stored on laser discs—considered indestructible at the time—so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.

“But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible—not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England's National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)”