Digital history could be lost forever due to changing devices, says expert
* by: By Claire Connelly, National technology and social media journalist
* From: News Limited Network
* September 07, 2012 12:00AM
HISTORIANS will be facing a black hole when it comes to studying the 20th and 21st centuries because much of our digital history is stored on technology that no longer have devices to read them, experts claim.
The information stored on everything from floppy disks to CDs, mobile phones to cameras is at risk of being lost forever, Canadian information security consultant Robert Slade told News Ltd.
"There was a sci-fi story from years ago about how all the knowledge in the universe was put into a huge storage library and then it got lost because nobody knew how to access it," Mr Slade said.
"That is getting to be frightening close to reality."
"It's rather ironic for the 'social media age', n'est ce pas," Mr Slade said.
Right now, the only solution is to continually transfer information from one device to another as old technologies die and other forms of media take their place.
And don't think cloud storage is a solution. That carries with it all kinds of problems, Mr Slade said.
Cloud service providers can lose, corrupt or make mistakes with data. Even worse, what if the company goes bust?
"What is their (cloud companies') privacy policy?," Mr Slade said. "Do you trust them regardless of their policies? Do you really know how they operate and what their business continuity planning is?"
The security consultant said that cloud storage also made people apathetic towards taking responsibility for their own data.
"Many people think that the cloud is 'magic' and so stop keeping local back-ups," he said.
When asked whether there was any way to ensure our data lasted the test of time, Mr Slade said "stone or clay tablets have proven to be very reliable".
"Actually paper, or even micro-film or microfiche can be very stable for much longer than we've had computers," he said.
Mr Slade knows first-hand the consequences of rapidly evolving technology. His father lost the entire records of his family's genealogy that he had spent time building on a database.
"That software no longer exists and the genealogy is dead," Mr Slade said.
Thankfully, Mr Slade was able to repeat his father's efforts on paper for longevity.
"It's ugly, but it exists," he said.
So why can't you just transfer data from one device to another?
Because computer files are arranged in a particular format which requires compatible software to be able to read, decode and render the file so that it appears on the screen in a language we understand.
Without the compatible "reader" the file just becomes a series of meaningless ones and zeroes.
Training coordinator for the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, Belinda Weaver told News Ltd that digital preservation was a massive problem being faced by business and universities around the world.
"There is stuff coming from labs and instruments and telescopes and emails and there's this huge volume of data that needs to be updated all the time," Ms Weaver said.
"We need to ensure we're hanging on to it in a way that we can find it again so that it doesn't fall into some vast unreadable archive somewhere never to be found again".
The archivist said people were actually better off converting documents on to celluloid film or micro-fishe because they lasted longer. So long as archive organisations and businesses had technology on which to read it, the information stored on it would remain intact.
Transferring files digitally comes with its own dangers. The files can get corrupted or lost. "Bit lock" can occur where one or two bits of information fall away, making the file unreadable.
"It's just a really onerous process," Ms Weaver said.
There's therefore a lot of money to be made in digital preservation, Ms Weaver said, and there were businesses around you could pay to convert your data, but that required trust that they could do the job properly, not to mention a sizeable fee.
Before making any decisions on copying your data, Ms Weaver emphasised the necessity of backing up everything that is valuable to you three times, on three different storage devices.
"We don't recommend people back up things to DVDs or CDs because they're just too fragile, but equally you have to keep refreshing that media," she said.
It's not as sexy as trying to invent a technology that reads every file format young, and old, but Ms Weaver said the best way to ensure we maintain an accurate record of our existence was to make sure you name the bloody files properly.
"When you look at people's computer files at home, you'll find it's called 'my stuff' or something similar,'' she said.
"(At the foundation) we teach people things like how to manage versions of files, the naming conventions, all of those things are important."
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