4 ms·

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice proposes a destructive digitisation of its archive of a couple of centuries worth of wills. https://twitter.com/MoJGovUK/sta

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice proposes a destructive digitisation of its archive of a couple of centuries worth of wills. https://twitter.com/MoJGovUK/status/1735642204809351595 https://twitter.com/MoJGovUK/status/1735642204809351595

firtoz 3y ago
Decentralised storage could be pretty cool for this, no?
- Sirizarry 3y ago
  Not if it’s destructive. Not entirely sure what the procedure is to digitize them but if the original is lost in the process, no amount of digital decentralization will help that and there are plenty of good arguments against relying on digital storage solutions for long term data storage. They’re just not long term enough (yet)
  - space_fountain 3y ago
    Idk, it's likely very expensive to maintain the physical copies. It's easy to say that the government should just do everything, but spending money to maintain an archive that probably is very rarely used isn't a good use of limited money. Digital copies aren't always infinitely durable, but they can be copied exactly which is something that can't be done with paper and honestly I'd guess more durable than a paper archive with a the same amount of money being spent
    - jart 3y ago
      In order to make digital data durable, you have to store it on cassette tape. This has the same issue as physical stuff in the sense that you have to wait for it to be recalled before you can access its data, which is why tape is normally only used for backup. So they'd have to have two digital copies, paying twice the price, one for prod and one for backup. At this point when it comes to managing that, we've already exceeded the ops competencies of most tech industry teams, let alone a homeless shelter. They're really much better off just leaving the wills as they are.
      - cbsmith 3y ago
        Yeah, but even three copies of stuff digitally is cheaper to maintain because we can back the data so much denser, and replicating it to newer media is so much faster.
      - space_fountain 3y ago
        Or you can pay aws 54 U.S. dollars a month maybe as much as 100x that and it still comes out much cheaper than a large space and staff to manage digital files. Maybe to be safe keep some magnetic tapes around too
    - 15457345234 3y ago
      > Idk, it's likely very expensive to maintain the physical copies. Maintaining a large paper archive is almost free in the grand scheme of things. The UK (and pretty much every single other Western nation) has an absolute ton of abandoned bunkers, silos and mines that were intended for Cold War disaster management. Most of them were built to very high standards in locations that won't flood or degrade significantly even if left cold and dark. Using them for archive storage is trivial. This seems like a very poor decision. We're seeing vulnerability after vulnerability pour in this year in just about every single OS out there and yet they think something like this is a good idea? The UK government appears to be trying to shut the country down without anybody noticing until it's too late; it's very weird to watch.
      - geraldwhen 3y ago
        Paper will be destroyed, eventually, in the presence of incorrect humidity levels. It’s just a matter of when.
        15457345234 3y ago
        Yes, you have to maintain the environment but these bunkers and facilities were designed with that factor taken into consideration. Yes, it isn't zero-effort, you can't just chuck your papers down a mineshaft and come back for them 50 years later, but it isn't in any way an insurmountable problem.
        jcrawfordor 3y ago
        Any sort of modernization work in these bunkers is extremely expensive because of their underground construction, and most have very poor humidity control because of water seepage. "Poor humidity control" is a bit of an understatement, many Cold War bunkers will fill with water over a course of days if power to the dewatering pumps is interrupted. It's really not nearly as practical as people like to think to reuse them. Consider the case of AT&T, which owns a vast fleet of underground bunkers and keeps replacing them with a surface building on the same site because it is simply unaffordable to maintain and modernize them. New electrical service, for example, requires excavation and a ton of coring thick concrete. The costs add up fast, every little thing is more complex and more costly underground. Fire, one of the biggest concerns in archival practice, is also much harder to manage in underground facilities. Document archive facilities are designed as distinct fire cells to mitigate the risk, and incorporating these features into bunkers would likely require rebuild from scratch. Refrigerant fire suppression systems are difficult to install because of inadequate evacuation routes; Cold War era underground facilities rarely have more than one staircase and one ladder (and the ladder shaft might be full of sand!). The disused military bunkers of the United States are littered with failed document storage companies that have been unable to sufficiently retrofit them for this use. Seriously, I would guesstimate as many as one in six former ICBM silos was, at some point, owned by one of these operations. More than one per field usually. Almost none have succeeded, and the exceptions have the appearance that they are more hobby projects than viable services. In most cases they didn't even finish stripping the old equipment, which is a very costly process since it has to be cut up underground to hoist out.
    - gorgoiler 3y ago
      There are costs other than volume of course, but if most wills are five or six sheets of paper then you can pack a million of them into one shipping container. A4 is 1/16th of a square metre, so on 80gsm paper with a density of 1.2x water, 1MW (mega will) is about 25m³. An ISO standard TEU shipping container has a volume of about 30m³. If you spaced everything out 10x you’d still only need 650 containers for all of the UK. That’s about 3% of the volume of a regular container ship, or roughly the number of containers you might see in a Hollywood standard bad guy dockyard confrontation movie scene.
      - mr_toad 3y ago
        You can’t just put paper in a shipping container and expect it to last longer than a few years.
      - space_fountain 3y ago
        Or you could put it all in like 15 terabytes and store it for like 54 U.S. dollars a month in s3 or buy a few big hard drives
- ballooney 3y ago
  no!
timthorn 3y ago
So please respond to the consultation: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/storage-and-retention-of-original-will-documents https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/storage-and-rete...
- hardlianotion 3y ago
  Of course.
crazygringo 3y ago
Can you clarify what is destructive? Is there a reason the originals need to be kept, like for some kind of chemical analysis? Or should descendants be allowed to claim them, and the rest auctioned off? Especially for something as generally mundane as wills, it's not obvious to me why high-resolution scans don't suffice for all future historical, legal, and archival purposes.
- hardlianotion 3y ago
  From the site explaining what is to be done: "Currently about 110 million physical documents are stored costing taxpayers £4.5 million per year. The consultation is seeking views on keeping hard copies for about 25 years, in recognition of their sentimental value to families, while saving them digitally longer term." https://www.gov.uk/government/news/easier-access-to-historic-wills-under-new-government-plans https://www.gov.uk/government/news/easier-access-to-historic... I was wrong to call the _process_ destructive, but I disagree with the proposed disposal policy.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  Even in a restricted context (the apparent documented information), hard copies have advantages over digital copies under two considerations. First, they survive technological obsolescence. Consider how even reading a floppy disk is a huge pain in the ass for most people today. Now stretch the time frame. (Some might say that all you need to do is copy the contents to a new medium when upgrading. Sure, you can do that, but it has a migration cost, and perhaps some risk. It's not a freebie. Compare that to keeping around hard copies.) Second, they have historically been less ephemeral. Sure, we have durable, write-once media out there that manufacturers claim will last thousands of years (we'll see in...thousands of years), but that's rare. For important stuff, you should a) keep the hard copy, b) make a digital copy, and c) create backups. You have the option of migrating or reinjesting the original source material, at least.
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    Hard copies have significant risks themselves - They're vulnerable to misfiling, to mishandling, and perhaps most importantly, destruction - By natural disaster or human hands. A well organized archive can have much more redundancy, including georedundancy, for the same price. Further, it can have massively redundant metadata - Imagine if we had a reasonable checksum of every document in the archives of everyone who was interested - And then in the event the main archive was lost or offline, we could have a verified reconstruction from the archives of people who had copies of the metadata and partial copies of the data. https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973 https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973

firtoz 3y ago

Decentralised storage could be pretty cool for this, no?

Sirizarry 3y ago
Not if it’s destructive. Not entirely sure what the procedure is to digitize them but if the original is lost in the process, no amount of digital decentralization will help that and there are plenty of good arguments against relying on digital storage solutions for long term data storage. They’re just not long term enough (yet)
- space_fountain 3y ago
  Idk, it's likely very expensive to maintain the physical copies. It's easy to say that the government should just do everything, but spending money to maintain an archive that probably is very rarely used isn't a good use of limited money. Digital copies aren't always infinitely durable, but they can be copied exactly which is something that can't be done with paper and honestly I'd guess more durable than a paper archive with a the same amount of money being spent
  - jart 3y ago
    In order to make digital data durable, you have to store it on cassette tape. This has the same issue as physical stuff in the sense that you have to wait for it to be recalled before you can access its data, which is why tape is normally only used for backup. So they'd have to have two digital copies, paying twice the price, one for prod and one for backup. At this point when it comes to managing that, we've already exceeded the ops competencies of most tech industry teams, let alone a homeless shelter. They're really much better off just leaving the wills as they are.
    - cbsmith 3y ago
      Yeah, but even three copies of stuff digitally is cheaper to maintain because we can back the data so much denser, and replicating it to newer media is so much faster.
    - space_fountain 3y ago
      Or you can pay aws 54 U.S. dollars a month maybe as much as 100x that and it still comes out much cheaper than a large space and staff to manage digital files. Maybe to be safe keep some magnetic tapes around too
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    > Idk, it's likely very expensive to maintain the physical copies. Maintaining a large paper archive is almost free in the grand scheme of things. The UK (and pretty much every single other Western nation) has an absolute ton of abandoned bunkers, silos and mines that were intended for Cold War disaster management. Most of them were built to very high standards in locations that won't flood or degrade significantly even if left cold and dark. Using them for archive storage is trivial. This seems like a very poor decision. We're seeing vulnerability after vulnerability pour in this year in just about every single OS out there and yet they think something like this is a good idea? The UK government appears to be trying to shut the country down without anybody noticing until it's too late; it's very weird to watch.
    - geraldwhen 3y ago
      Paper will be destroyed, eventually, in the presence of incorrect humidity levels. It’s just a matter of when.
      - 15457345234 3y ago
        Yes, you have to maintain the environment but these bunkers and facilities were designed with that factor taken into consideration. Yes, it isn't zero-effort, you can't just chuck your papers down a mineshaft and come back for them 50 years later, but it isn't in any way an insurmountable problem.
        jcrawfordor 3y ago
        Any sort of modernization work in these bunkers is extremely expensive because of their underground construction, and most have very poor humidity control because of water seepage. "Poor humidity control" is a bit of an understatement, many Cold War bunkers will fill with water over a course of days if power to the dewatering pumps is interrupted. It's really not nearly as practical as people like to think to reuse them. Consider the case of AT&T, which owns a vast fleet of underground bunkers and keeps replacing them with a surface building on the same site because it is simply unaffordable to maintain and modernize them. New electrical service, for example, requires excavation and a ton of coring thick concrete. The costs add up fast, every little thing is more complex and more costly underground. Fire, one of the biggest concerns in archival practice, is also much harder to manage in underground facilities. Document archive facilities are designed as distinct fire cells to mitigate the risk, and incorporating these features into bunkers would likely require rebuild from scratch. Refrigerant fire suppression systems are difficult to install because of inadequate evacuation routes; Cold War era underground facilities rarely have more than one staircase and one ladder (and the ladder shaft might be full of sand!). The disused military bunkers of the United States are littered with failed document storage companies that have been unable to sufficiently retrofit them for this use. Seriously, I would guesstimate as many as one in six former ICBM silos was, at some point, owned by one of these operations. More than one per field usually. Almost none have succeeded, and the exceptions have the appearance that they are more hobby projects than viable services. In most cases they didn't even finish stripping the old equipment, which is a very costly process since it has to be cut up underground to hoist out.
  - gorgoiler 3y ago
    There are costs other than volume of course, but if most wills are five or six sheets of paper then you can pack a million of them into one shipping container. A4 is 1/16th of a square metre, so on 80gsm paper with a density of 1.2x water, 1MW (mega will) is about 25m³. An ISO standard TEU shipping container has a volume of about 30m³. If you spaced everything out 10x you’d still only need 650 containers for all of the UK. That’s about 3% of the volume of a regular container ship, or roughly the number of containers you might see in a Hollywood standard bad guy dockyard confrontation movie scene.
    - mr_toad 3y ago
      You can’t just put paper in a shipping container and expect it to last longer than a few years.
    - space_fountain 3y ago
      Or you could put it all in like 15 terabytes and store it for like 54 U.S. dollars a month in s3 or buy a few big hard drives
ballooney 3y ago
no!

timthorn 3y ago

So please respond to the consultation: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/storage-and-retention-of-original-will-documents https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/storage-and-rete...

hardlianotion 3y ago
Of course.

crazygringo 3y ago

Can you clarify what is destructive? Is there a reason the originals need to be kept, like for some kind of chemical analysis? Or should descendants be allowed to claim them, and the rest auctioned off? Especially for something as generally mundane as wills, it's not obvious to me why high-resolution scans don't suffice for all future historical, legal, and archival purposes.

hardlianotion 3y ago
From the site explaining what is to be done: "Currently about 110 million physical documents are stored costing taxpayers £4.5 million per year. The consultation is seeking views on keeping hard copies for about 25 years, in recognition of their sentimental value to families, while saving them digitally longer term." https://www.gov.uk/government/news/easier-access-to-historic-wills-under-new-government-plans https://www.gov.uk/government/news/easier-access-to-historic... I was wrong to call the _process_ destructive, but I disagree with the proposed disposal policy.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Even in a restricted context (the apparent documented information), hard copies have advantages over digital copies under two considerations. First, they survive technological obsolescence. Consider how even reading a floppy disk is a huge pain in the ass for most people today. Now stretch the time frame. (Some might say that all you need to do is copy the contents to a new medium when upgrading. Sure, you can do that, but it has a migration cost, and perhaps some risk. It's not a freebie. Compare that to keeping around hard copies.) Second, they have historically been less ephemeral. Sure, we have durable, write-once media out there that manufacturers claim will last thousands of years (we'll see in...thousands of years), but that's rare. For important stuff, you should a) keep the hard copy, b) make a digital copy, and c) create backups. You have the option of migrating or reinjesting the original source material, at least.
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  Hard copies have significant risks themselves - They're vulnerable to misfiling, to mishandling, and perhaps most importantly, destruction - By natural disaster or human hands. A well organized archive can have much more redundancy, including georedundancy, for the same price. Further, it can have massively redundant metadata - Imagine if we had a reasonable checksum of every document in the archives of everyone who was interested - And then in the event the main archive was lost or offline, we could have a verified reconstruction from the archives of people who had copies of the metadata and partial copies of the data. https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973 https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973