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Honest questions, if you don't mind: - What types of systems are these? - When you say "40 year history", do you mean the system was originally written in the

Honest questions, if you don't mind: - What types of systems are these? - When you say "40 year history", do you mean the system was originally written in the 70's, or do you mean it has data going back to then? - Why do you need to keep data for 30 years? Regulatory reasons? Reporting? Or just long-lived data? I'm not doubting anything you're saying. It's easy to imagine systems with those attributes, say, in banking, insurance, legal records, etc. I'm just curious about your specific case. :) Long after the logic of your system has been replaced, the data will live on. It's something I think people tend to undervalue.

Spooky23 11y ago
No problem -- I'm really passionate about this topic! .gov stuff. Every state in the union has social services systems that were stood up in the 60s and 70s, and have or are being transitioned over time from whatever mainframe they were in to modern stuff. Usually the long term stuff is retained. These folks deal with situations like disabled children who become wards of the state. Their records need to exist well until those children are in their 40s. Thats just one example -- Public works projects are built with 50+ year lifespans, and many of those records are expected to exist for at least that long. There's also a whole historical responsibility thing that I think will become more important. You can develop a deep understanding of how a governor or Mayor made certain decisions going back to the American revolution (my county has records of the legislative body from the Dutch colonial period). Digitalization has erased a lot of that -- in many cases we cannot read data from the 1980s. I think issues like this are already starting to appear on a small/personal scale -- when my grandfather died in 1980s, all of his business records, personal records, pictures, etc were on paper somewhere in his home. You could sift through and keep important things. What do you do when the only protection your data in Dropbox/et al is one missed credit card transaction away from oblivion?
- Tenhundfeld 11y ago
  Cool. Thanks. BTW, I think you're 100% correct about this becoming more important / more of a visible problem. On a small scale, it's something I wrestle with often. For example, I love the convenience of buying a book on my Kindle, but I'm reminded of the joy of wandering through my grandparents' library and wonder if my daughter (and so on) will be able to have a similar experience – what happens to those my Amazon purchases after I'm gone? Another example is that I keep a sporadic journal in Evernote. Should I really be printing out those writings in case I have a curious descendant? I've enjoyed reading letters and journals of ancestors. On the other hand, digitalization has obvious benefits too. But we have to be deliberate in our curation and storage format. For example, it's great that correspondence (email) is now automatically archived rather than it being a tedious process (carbon copy, hand-copying, etc.). But how many people backup their email out of their cloud provider to a personally owned copy in a human-readable format? I actually do backup my Gmail account occasionally. But I doubt my wife knows where it is. Or if she'd be able to look past the XML format. And even if she did, there are literally millions of emails in there from mailing lists and work stuff and spam and whatever. The percentage of actual meaningful correspondence is unbelievably low. I don't know. It's a big problem, I think.

Spooky23 11y ago

No problem -- I'm really passionate about this topic! .gov stuff. Every state in the union has social services systems that were stood up in the 60s and 70s, and have or are being transitioned over time from whatever mainframe they were in to modern stuff. Usually the long term stuff is retained. These folks deal with situations like disabled children who become wards of the state. Their records need to exist well until those children are in their 40s. Thats just one example -- Public works projects are built with 50+ year lifespans, and many of those records are expected to exist for at least that long. There's also a whole historical responsibility thing that I think will become more important. You can develop a deep understanding of how a governor or Mayor made certain decisions going back to the American revolution (my county has records of the legislative body from the Dutch colonial period). Digitalization has erased a lot of that -- in many cases we cannot read data from the 1980s. I think issues like this are already starting to appear on a small/personal scale -- when my grandfather died in 1980s, all of his business records, personal records, pictures, etc were on paper somewhere in his home. You could sift through and keep important things. What do you do when the only protection your data in Dropbox/et al is one missed credit card transaction away from oblivion?

Tenhundfeld 11y ago
Cool. Thanks. BTW, I think you're 100% correct about this becoming more important / more of a visible problem. On a small scale, it's something I wrestle with often. For example, I love the convenience of buying a book on my Kindle, but I'm reminded of the joy of wandering through my grandparents' library and wonder if my daughter (and so on) will be able to have a similar experience – what happens to those my Amazon purchases after I'm gone? Another example is that I keep a sporadic journal in Evernote. Should I really be printing out those writings in case I have a curious descendant? I've enjoyed reading letters and journals of ancestors. On the other hand, digitalization has obvious benefits too. But we have to be deliberate in our curation and storage format. For example, it's great that correspondence (email) is now automatically archived rather than it being a tedious process (carbon copy, hand-copying, etc.). But how many people backup their email out of their cloud provider to a personally owned copy in a human-readable format? I actually do backup my Gmail account occasionally. But I doubt my wife knows where it is. Or if she'd be able to look past the XML format. And even if she did, there are literally millions of emails in there from mailing lists and work stuff and spam and whatever. The percentage of actual meaningful correspondence is unbelievably low. I don't know. It's a big problem, I think.