On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 11:39:25AM +0100, Mathieu Chouquet-Stringer wrote:
> The problem I see is not so much storage but technology. Say you store
> your CDs or DVDs (or tapes, flash cards, whatever) in a proper manner,
> what kind of device are you going to use in 20 years from now to read
> them?
Due to the amount of media out there, drives that can read CDs and DVDs will
probably still be commonly available 20 years from now, just as turntables and
cassette decks are now. Note that even up-and-coming technologies like
holographic storage are likely to use same-form-factor optical disc media and
likely to read everything back to CDs. Yes, they'll quite likely be fading out
by then, but even if no one is still selling them new, there will be eBay or
its equivalent to find old hardware, companies that offer transcription
services, etc. How hard would be it to get some old Beta tapes transcribed
today? Not very.
15 years after I got rid of my C64 hardware, it was easy to find someone who
still had such hardware and was willing to transcribe my old (70KB, I think!)
disks for me. If I hadn't been able to, I'd have had to pick up a machine on
eBay - all it would require is caring that much. Heck, there are a half dozen
Commodore *tape drives* up on eBay that this moment; if I wanted to I could
read my quarter-century-old VIC-20 tapes (yes, they'd probably still be
readable).
Really, on a single-lifetime scale, the media obsolescence problem is
overblown. As long as you care enough, you'll be able to find a way of
transcribing your old media. It probably won't even require all that much
persistence. Beyond a lifetime, your biggest problem is that your descendents
- if any - may not care enough to bother, and on that timescale it *will* be
getting rapidly more difficult to extract. But working in the other direction,
anything that fits on any media now you'll eventually be able to email around
to anyone who might care, thus increasing the chance of its survival :)
In that vein, the 60 old DDS tapes I extracted all live online now, and after
removal of duplicate files fit on a single 40GB DDS-IV tape, so I can keep a
copy here and there...
None of this is to say that you shouldn't be diligent about maintaining your
digital archives. I put quite a bit of effort into it. But it isn't all doom
and gloom for those who don't.
> Take a print or a slide from 40 years ago (or more) and you don't need
> anything special to look at them...
If they haven't been lost, or burned in a fire (my parents' house burned as I
was gestating), or abandoned by whoever happened to have custody of them -
all because it is difficult and expensive to duplicate a substantial collection
of slides/prints/etc.
My slides from the last 25 years are molding, and now that it's started there
doesn't seem to be much I can do to stop it, though hopefully I've slowed it
with dehumidifiers. I thought I was doing the *right* thing by keeping them
all in a fire safe, but it turned out to be a humidity trap. I was unlucky -
just as you can be with digital media.
By the time I'm done scanning them, BD will be available, and I'll be able to
store all 10,000-odd of them in as good-enough jpegs ("good enough" that my
head wouldn't explode if I were to lose all the raw versions and the slides
themselves) on a single disk, and again keep copies in many places, and give
copies to anyone who might care to preserve them. *That's* security! :)
John
--
John DuBois [EMAIL PROTECTED] KC6QKZ/AE http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/
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