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It's a bit of a glib argument but it does hold water. The main points are that a timeframe of 30 years is actually quite short. While the moving image on film

by jwarren 10y ago

It's a bit of a glib argument but it does hold water. The main points are that a timeframe of 30 years is actually quite short. While the moving image on film has only been around for about 120 years, ideally archivists would have film copies that would last far longer than that. Our idea of a computer in 120 years may be very different from what we currently use. More mundanely, what about when the last optical drive is manufactured? We'll suddenly have a finite number of reads left in the world. Or the hard drive connector breaks and it hasn't been manufactured for 30 years. Sure, a special one-off manufacturing run is certainly possible, but could a struggling and under-staffed archive afford to do that for every one of it's thousand hard drives, especially when it may not know exactly what's on every one of them? I'm know I'm being a devil's advocate here, but I did want to illustrate that every unknown part of this equation is exactly what scares working archivists.

eslaught 10y ago
> what about when the last optical drive is manufactured? [...] There are two types of digital archiving. One, which you're describing in this line of reasoning, is keeping a digital storage device in cold storage, booting up later, and trying to read the data. I agree that this has significant issues, as digital devices are physical devices, in addition to being digital ones, and not necessarily that reliable at that. There is also digital archiving in the sense of understanding what the bits represent. I would argue that this sense of the phrase is actually more compelling, because fundamentally digital data is just a bag of bits. While this would be more effort than I'd go to personally, I'd expect any competent digital archivist to store their data in a ZFS-based disk array, SAN, or cloud service like S3, or ideally multiple of the above. (Or futures equivalents of these techniques.) Yes, any given service, technology, or device may come and go. But this is missing the point. The way you achieve continuity is by periodically refreshing the storage so that at any given point in time the data is stored in a modern (for the time) storage device. There are still important issues to be solved, but the important ones are no longer questions of maintain physical devices, which is key. (E.g. the codec problem.) The main situation in which this approach does not work out is if you're trying to do archeological-type recovery of a digital storage device that has not been actively maintained. Then you're back in scenario #1. But if we're asking about a situation where someone actively cares about preserving their own data, the situation is not nearly as bad as these arguments make out.

by jwarren 10y ago

eslaught 10y ago

> what about when the last optical drive is manufactured? [...] There are two types of digital archiving. One, which you're describing in this line of reasoning, is keeping a digital storage device in cold storage, booting up later, and trying to read the data. I agree that this has significant issues, as digital devices are physical devices, in addition to being digital ones, and not necessarily that reliable at that. There is also digital archiving in the sense of understanding what the bits represent. I would argue that this sense of the phrase is actually more compelling, because fundamentally digital data is just a bag of bits. While this would be more effort than I'd go to personally, I'd expect any competent digital archivist to store their data in a ZFS-based disk array, SAN, or cloud service like S3, or ideally multiple of the above. (Or futures equivalents of these techniques.) Yes, any given service, technology, or device may come and go. But this is missing the point. The way you achieve continuity is by periodically refreshing the storage so that at any given point in time the data is stored in a modern (for the time) storage device. There are still important issues to be solved, but the important ones are no longer questions of maintain physical devices, which is key. (E.g. the codec problem.) The main situation in which this approach does not work out is if you're trying to do archeological-type recovery of a digital storage device that has not been actively maintained. Then you're back in scenario #1. But if we're asking about a situation where someone actively cares about preserving their own data, the situation is not nearly as bad as these arguments make out.