5 ms·

I wonder what the maintenance costs would be to keep a digital document storage system running robustly and effectively for 800 years (as long as the Magna Cart

by lhnz 11y ago

I wonder what the maintenance costs would be to keep a digital document storage system running robustly and effectively for 800 years (as long as the Magna Carta document lasted)? (Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness, and I'd not want to throw that away just because you want to be capital-D Digital.)

richmarr 11y ago
> Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness Not to mention supporting the UK's tourism brand... castles and queens and whatnot.
- ranko 11y ago
  The documents discussed here are acts of parliament, which almost no-one (particularly tourists) will ever see once they've been stored in the tower.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    You're missing the distinction between brand & marketing there. The Situation Room is part of the Whitehouse's brand whether tourists get to see it or not.
    - neximo4 11y ago
      The other thing is it is real of course, the intent of it isn't for tourists, neither are the 'castles and queens' and the branding as you put it. Not saying it doesn't help tourism, its just not the intent of it all & doesn't have much bearing on the decisions being taken as much as the simple act of continuing traditions.
a-priori 11y ago
The closest equivalent I can think of immediately is Amazon Glacier, which is intended for 'long-term' storage where they take care of transferring the data as necessary to preserve its accessibility. Obviously they're thinking years-to-decades, not centuries, but as a ballpark it may work. Their current pricing is $0.0007 per GB-month, or $0.000064 per KB for 800 years in today's dollars. Since the Latin text of Magna Carta is 28 KB of UTF-8 text, that works out to $0.0018 to store the text for 800 years. You'd obviously also want a high-resolution scan of the original document. I don't know how big that would be. If it was a 100MB image, it would cost $6.66 to store for 800 years at Amazon's current Glacier prices. Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service, of price stability to deliver the quality of service, and so on. And perhaps the biggest issue with this analysis is that we're also relying on huge economies of scale for it to be profitable to deliver an archival service like this over centuries. If this sounds crazy cheap to you, you're not alone. As technologists we're used to dealing with huge volumes of data, so it's easy to forget that historically these volumes simply did not exist.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service Even assuming the corporate entity will survive that long is dicey. To ensure survival of a document on such as service you can not just look at the cost of a storage service, but the cost of infrastructure to care for it. E.g. just the matter of keeping an organization alive for the duration to ensure an account is kept active and live and prepared to ensure each and every monthly bill is paid.
- brudgers 11y ago
  The Magna Carta survived wars and revolutions and changes of government and economic collapses and the Black Death. Glacier may struggle with a long electrical blackout.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
beejiu 11y ago
Given the government's history of failed and overbudget IT projects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...), probably billions of pounds for something that half works.
profmonocle 11y ago
Hard to say, considering tech will continue to evolve over that time. Who knows, 100 years from now we might have found an extremely reliable way to store digital information long-term, thus we'd only have to do the "copy from one medium to another" dance for a few generations. Or we might not.
chippy 11y ago
It would require a trust, a fund and a dedicated organisation, possibly using lawyers. Legal documents relating to land and titles have survived for hundreds of years in this manner. It's a social not a technological problem. But how to do it is much easier to solve. Why to do it is the actual problem. What to keep and when to keep it without knowing the future. How does anyone know that the 100 photos that a person from Morocco put onto Flickr 5 years ago would have value in the future? Why should those be archived? In 200 years these photos could be immensely valuable. How can this potential future value ensure the archiving of the photos today? Is there economics for this?
avani 11y ago
Our research group is looking at this exact question, and it turns out that there are several factors that effect the balance between cost and reliability/longevity in an archive. Paper: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf

by lhnz 11y ago

richmarr 11y ago

> Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness Not to mention supporting the UK's tourism brand... castles and queens and whatnot.

ranko 11y ago
The documents discussed here are acts of parliament, which almost no-one (particularly tourists) will ever see once they've been stored in the tower.
- richmarr 11y ago
  You're missing the distinction between brand & marketing there. The Situation Room is part of the Whitehouse's brand whether tourists get to see it or not.
  - neximo4 11y ago
    The other thing is it is real of course, the intent of it isn't for tourists, neither are the 'castles and queens' and the branding as you put it. Not saying it doesn't help tourism, its just not the intent of it all & doesn't have much bearing on the decisions being taken as much as the simple act of continuing traditions.

a-priori 11y ago

The closest equivalent I can think of immediately is Amazon Glacier, which is intended for 'long-term' storage where they take care of transferring the data as necessary to preserve its accessibility. Obviously they're thinking years-to-decades, not centuries, but as a ballpark it may work. Their current pricing is $0.0007 per GB-month, or $0.000064 per KB for 800 years in today's dollars. Since the Latin text of Magna Carta is 28 KB of UTF-8 text, that works out to $0.0018 to store the text for 800 years. You'd obviously also want a high-resolution scan of the original document. I don't know how big that would be. If it was a 100MB image, it would cost $6.66 to store for 800 years at Amazon's current Glacier prices. Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service, of price stability to deliver the quality of service, and so on. And perhaps the biggest issue with this analysis is that we're also relying on huge economies of scale for it to be profitable to deliver an archival service like this over centuries. If this sounds crazy cheap to you, you're not alone. As technologists we're used to dealing with huge volumes of data, so it's easy to forget that historically these volumes simply did not exist.

vidarh 11y ago
> Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service Even assuming the corporate entity will survive that long is dicey. To ensure survival of a document on such as service you can not just look at the cost of a storage service, but the cost of infrastructure to care for it. E.g. just the matter of keeping an organization alive for the duration to ensure an account is kept active and live and prepared to ensure each and every monthly bill is paid.
brudgers 11y ago
The Magna Carta survived wars and revolutions and changes of government and economic collapses and the Black Death. Glacier may struggle with a long electrical blackout.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

beejiu 11y ago

Given the government's history of failed and overbudget IT projects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...), probably billions of pounds for something that half works.

profmonocle 11y ago

Hard to say, considering tech will continue to evolve over that time. Who knows, 100 years from now we might have found an extremely reliable way to store digital information long-term, thus we'd only have to do the "copy from one medium to another" dance for a few generations. Or we might not.

chippy 11y ago

It would require a trust, a fund and a dedicated organisation, possibly using lawyers. Legal documents relating to land and titles have survived for hundreds of years in this manner. It's a social not a technological problem. But how to do it is much easier to solve. Why to do it is the actual problem. What to keep and when to keep it without knowing the future. How does anyone know that the 100 photos that a person from Morocco put onto Flickr 5 years ago would have value in the future? Why should those be archived? In 200 years these photos could be immensely valuable. How can this potential future value ensure the archiving of the photos today? Is there economics for this?

avani 11y ago

Our research group is looking at this exact question, and it turns out that there are several factors that effect the balance between cost and reliability/longevity in an archive. Paper: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf