Nothing lasts forever
Nothing lasts forever - and Variety are drawing our attention once again to the fact that this is more true now than ever. They're talking about movies, a colleague at VUW is concerned about multimedia and I keep thinking about all that teaching and research data my colleagues keep on hard drives and CDs in the belief that they have permanently stored it.
In a former job I once scored an expensive bottle of whisky by saving a friends PhD thesis. The only up to date copy was stored on a single floppy. Luckily I had access to good tools and the failure only affected one sector - she got the file back and saved herself weeks of work repeating things she'd already done. (Funny how the second version is never as good isn't it - you always know the first version was better).
If anything, the problem is getting worse. Apart from the plague that was ZIP disks (click - click - click anyone?) our media have become somewhat more reliable, certainly than floppy disks, but the amount of information on a single storage device has grown exponentially, thus increasing the risk. A single failure of a DVD and you've lost the equivalent of over 6000 floppy disks, a 250 GB disk and you've lost over 300,000 floppies - try re-typing that lot. There's also the problem that information is connected - systems like iTunes and iPhoto are wonderful but they do mean that all your data eggs are in one basket. A single bad OS upgrade (Leopard betas for example?) and everything's gone.
Yes, we're all meant to backup religiously, but then again we all floss daily and ring our mothers once a week as well. Its so easy to miss the details - and that's personal data, where we might expect to be familiar with what's important. Moving to the organisational level is just that much harder and more complicated. Massive projects are being undertaken by JPL, NASA, and the National Libraries of the world to stem the flow, and they're having to face the problem that media like disks and tapes are deteriorating almost as fast as the data is written.
I wonder how many teachers are at risk of losing their courses because of the presumption that the VLE/LMS backup is sound? I wonder how much research data waits to vansish along with the discovery that burned CDs and DVDs can fail in less than three years? At least we should be greatful they fail hard - imagine the effect of subtle, unnoticed changes, a bit here, a bit there, suddenly numbers change - would we ever notice?
And yet we have people who think that the real problem is the need to protect their bits from copying under any circumstances and with the full protection of the law even when their technology destroys the property of others, and who want the ability to control access to information so that they can monetise human existence in detail. It would be nice to think that media companies like Sony would expend at least as much effort on improving the reliability and longevity of media as the are spending on bad copy protection, but I have the nasty suspicion that the latter gets resources at the cost of the former.
I have to wonder if creators in the future will mourn the loss of their creations, lost because of the fear and paranoia of the publishers, or if the manufactured fear of lost millions now will compensate them and us for the loss of our culture and knowledge? Your children may well find an old DVD tucked in the attic in a box of junk but I doubt they'll ever know what it once held and they certainly won't thank their ancestor for the inheritance.