Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk

[Turborama]

Source: The Guardian

Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.

Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.

Cerf called for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are.

=snip=

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,” Cerf told the Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf?CMP=fb_gu

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Until just recently, I though all of my dissertation data was already there.

Most of it had been stored on 3.5" disks, and I no longer have any computers with a 3.5" drive, and tbh, I don't know if they even still sell such drives. But just a couple of days ago, while trying to move some pictures off a laptop, I found an old jump drive, and it looks like much, maybe even all, of my various spreadsheets, data file outputs, drafts of journal submissions, etc, was on that drive.

Of course, that was a matter of moving it to newer media, not updating the programs used to read it. But at least with programs such as Word or Excel, you can take older version data and read it in and save it off in the newer format, if it matters.

I doubt my dissertation data is of interest to anyone any more though, beyond the distilled parts that got published, and are referenced once in a blue moon by someone else doing mineralogy. The tech changes in data collection tools have already gotten an order of magnitude or two better since my work was done. Even the last time I set foot in a crystallography lab, several decades ago, the data sets being collected were a dozen times larger than my work, and took half the time to collect.

Someone wishing to replicate what I did could probably do it in a weekend now, rather than the years I took.

[Arcadiasix]

8. Go on ebay you can buy a 3.5 external drive that will connect usinga usb they run about $10 to $15

[ieoeja]

16. Early PC days I wrote a custom database engine for an application.

Because the configurable ones were too slow. When 3.5's came out, I made sure to copy it from floppy to 3.5. Then I forgot about it.

So it lay in a desk drawer for 20 years. Still had access to a 3.5 drive when I found it. But it had degraded by then and was unreadable. Not due to a lack of software or hardware. These things also fade with time.

[hedda_foil]

18. You can buy a 3-1/2" external floppy drive.

I got mine at Tiger Direct for about $25.

[PoliticAverse]

2. Then again things online are just disappearing, see...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016113235

[Sunlei]

3. don't worry, the USA gov. collected all this data and pays billions for storage to the end of time.

The Gov. will pay billions more to open the files someday

[MBS]

4. I worry about this a lot

and, yes, especially the photos. (Boy, have I got to get busy and print out those photos as soon as I have the money to do so).

Librarians and archivists have supposedly (per some NYT article I read about 10 years ago) been worried about this for at least the last 10-20 years.

But, watching how this plays out in my everyday life, all I see is libraries and publishers moving whole-hog into 100% digital life, and correspondence quickly becoming 100% online-internet only. Libraries discontinuing hard-copy subscriptions, more and more periodicals as online-only publications.

To avoid the changing-media, changing internet provider problems, I do try to keep hard copies and/or pdfs of important email correspondence. But still things have fallen through the cracks. With no way to read the files, I've finally thrown out a bunch of old floppy discs, crossing my fingers that I've made copies of whatever was important on those discs.

As I've gone through old family papers, and finding such pleasure in those old photos and letters, I find myself wondering, will subsequent generations be able to glean anything about our lives after 2000?
"Black hole" and "lost century seem apt metaphors.

[blackspade]

5. This has been an ongoing issue in the archival community for the last...

Twenty years at least.
But politicians and the average Joe have a myopic view of history and the documentation that makes studying the past possible.

[enlightenment]

20. It is a very important issue

that doesn't receive the attention it deserves.

It goes beyond what is digitally collected. As tech has advanced, skills that we used to employ on a regular basis are disappearing. When I tell students that people in the 18th century would regularly make copies of their written letters, they look at me like I've grown another head.
Why? They ask. For posterity, I say . . . and how many of you have written a letter on paper lately? How many of you keep a diary, or write down recipes, or even print out a photograph? What will your descendents know of you, long after you are gone?

As an historian, it feels like we are creating a "dark age". Five hundred years from now, what will the future use to resurrect our age if the ability to read the digitized ephemera of our lives is lost?

[blackspade]

29. Considering the gaps I find in the historical record....

just from the late 19th century, there will be an even bigger black hole for the late 20th into the 21st.

The reliance on Digital storage is so misguided without proper curation.

[enlightenment]

31. I agree.

It's a much bigger issue than people realize - and I'm afraid most won't until it is far too late.

[leveymg]

6. Don't worry. Big Brother has a long memory and endless curiosity about us.

Not to mention a limitless budget. He might just rent us our stuff back, if we lose it.

[PatrynXX]

7. AOL's pictures

don't have many of the old .art files but I have a few and have yet to find a program that does maybe one of those sites that has old versions of programs can get me to convert.... losing emails. eh.. happens alot.... besides Jeb Bush probably has them smh

[suffragette]

22. Graphic Converter can open and import many old formats

Don't know if that's one, but you can check.

http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/key-features/import-and-export-formats/

[hunter]

28. I don't know if there is any easy way.

I have an old laptop that's running a slightly hacked version of Windows 98SE that let's it read and write larger USB sticks. The AOL version of Internet Explorer (I think it's something like IE 5.5) will open .art files and then they can be saved as bitmaps on a USB stick. It's a chore. I suppose the same thing could be done by running Windows 95 or 98 in a virtual machine. I don't know if there's any automated way to do it. Irfanview doesn't do it

AOL used some crappy proprietary form of compression.

This is a very good example of the problem discussed in the original post.

[William Seger]

9. All of my earliest digital photos are on Zip disks

... and my old Zip drive has a serial interface which I recently realized is now obsolete. Before it's too late, I need to move them off, but I no longer have a computer with a serial port. Fortunately, a friend has one, but it has a bad hard drive and won't boot, so I still need to put a drive in it and find an old copy of Windows to install on it. Quite a pain, and one I didn't think about when I was saving the photos.

[bananas]

12. You can get USB adapters with serial ports

Here's one, GSA approved
http://www.tripplite.com/high-speed-usb-to-serial-adapter-keyspan~USA19HS/

[William Seger]

24. Thanks!

Actually, my Zip is parallel, but it turns out there is a cable available for that too, so thanks for the suggestion. Now, I just need to hope that the software that's supposed to convert the old Casio camera CAM file format to JPG actually works....

[Jackpine Radical]

21. Yeah, those Zip drives were a real flash in the pan.

They looked for a while like they would be the replacement for the 3.5" disk.

I think I still have a parallel-port Zip drive around, along with a box of ancient data of some kind on Zip disks.

[William Seger]

23. It's been so long, I had forgotten which is which, but mine is parallel too

... but with Bananas' suggestion, I looked and there is a parallel-to-USB cable available for $10. That looks a lot easier than getting the old clunker running.

[edhopper]

10. in 1998, I had an expensive set of CDs

with every National Geographic magazine ever published.

Around the time of Windows XP the file type was no longer supported and the CDs were unreadable.

[father founding]

11. B.S.

Wasn't this the rationale to go digital in the first place. It would last forever, HUH !

[jwirr]

13. First they convince us to use the software for storage and then they allow it to become obsolete.

The industry owes it to us to deal with this program before the data is lost. I am speaking as a family genealogist. Everything is in that one file. I would lose all the work (and expense) I have been doing since 1965. The old photo album in the bookcase was more reliable.

[Retrograde]

14. Not exactly news

It's been a concern at least since the 1980s when the agency I worked for had large amounts of data on tapes that it couldn't read anymore. And "digital vellum" still sounds like it's digital.

[whatthehey]

15. Blindingly simple fix for most of this

I've had my important files on floppies, Zip drives, CD-Rs, flash drives, external HD and cloud drives. I've had documents in .txt, .wpd, whatever extension AmiPro used in the mid 90s I can't recall, and several versions of .doc and .docx. I've had music in .wav, .mp3, .ogg and .flac and .ape.

Why? Because I bloody well change the media and formats when new versions START supplanting the old and cross-compatibility is easy, not wait until 20 years after they have disappeared and then whine I can't read 5.25" floppy disks on a standard laptop (although FWIW USB connected 5.25 readers still exist)

[csziggy]

17. So long as the images, documents, etc are transferred to newer formats

They can be saved. Over the years I have converted from various image formats to more standard file types.

Rather than the SFW (Seattle FilmWorks) proprietary format, I converted all my pictures to bitmaps (BMP), then to TIFF, and for everyday use to JPGs. For documents I want to save long term, I save as PDFs (Portable Document Format) instead of Word Perfect or Word files - or RTF. Text files are pretty standard, so I am not as concerned about them. I have databases I have converted from a proprietary format to XLS (Exel) and to CSV (comma separated values) so they are more portable - some of those databases date back to my first DOS computer purchased in 1986. My genealogical databases are saved as GEDcoms which are the universal genealogical format - but I also keep hard copies of the documentation for my research.

Where I lost data was the conversion from my first computer - an Apple ][ - but there was little that was needed in the long term. It just was not possible to transfer data from Apple to DOS computers back in 1986. I printed out what I thought was essential, but the business data was not needed after only a few years and the rest I simply typed into the 'new' computer - since then I have been able to port data from one computer to another.

It takes time and diligence - backing up the data to non-volatile storage is important. I have stacks and stacks of CDRs and DVDRs of data, mostly images, that I have saved over the years. I've never had a basic home burned data disc go bad - even my oldest ones are still readable. Proprietary back up discs on the other hand seldom were accessible after a crash or a computer upgrade. The best decision I made with a computer upgrade in the late 1990s was to go with a CD burner rather than a ZIP disc!

The most important part is with every technological upgrade to convert and re-save the data in new formats on the newer media. As soon as I got a CD burner, I copied everything off my floppies (5.25" and 3.5&quot to CDRs. While I still have some of those floppies that I can no longer read without re-buying old technology, I don't need them since the data is now on the newer media. I also believe in redundancy - all those old original CDRs have been copied to newer discs periodically. So if the old CDRs go bad - original estimates were they'd have a 10 year life span - I still have the data.

[groundloop]

19. 3.5" floppies.... hell, I've still got a stack of 8" floppies at home

I seriously doubt if I'm ever gonna' find a reader for those anymore.

[47of74]

25. The elementary school I went to had buried a 5 1/4 disk in a time capsule in 1986

1986 was the school's 25th anniversary. I was in 5th grade at the time and they buried a number of items from that year in the capsule. One of the things was a 5 1/4 disk that was supposed to have a quiz and some other materials on it. That was the standard back then with the Apple IIs the school had. School administrators working there at the time thought they wouldn't have any problems with accessing the disk 25 years later - that 5 1/4 drives would still be prevelant. (They said they had a backup of the disk in case it was damaged). Fast forward 25 years to 2011 for the school's 50th anniversary. The school dug the capsule up but realized they had nothing to read the 5 1/4 disk with anymore. All the Apple IIs and the disk drives were long gone by then.

[Jamastiene]

26. Any really important data I save, I try to save copies of the exe files

for whatever program opens that data. The problem I am running into now is that some programs that worked just fine on Windows XP don't work on Windows 7 at all.

Another oddity: I have a game, a disc from the game company, that if you put it into a Windows XP computer, it installs Milton Bradley/Parker Brothers/Hasbro (all three companies are listed on the disc) Board Games, but if you put the same disc into a Windows 7 computer, it installs Card Games and you cannot even find the Board Games exe file on Windows 7 or the Card Games on XP. It is like two completely different discs depending on which operating system you use to browse the files on the disc or try to use the installer. Thing is, even in compatibility mode, it will not let you have the Board Games on Windows 7. I wanted the board games, because that is the version of Parcheesi that I like. I don't like other versions. I want that one back. So, I'm screwn unless I keep one machine running only Windows XP. The one machine I have with Windows XP on it doesn't have a disc drive either. So, I'm screwn x2. If I put the disc in my Windows 7 machine and try to install from there through the home network, it still isn't going to let me install the board games even on the Windows XP machine. On top of that, even if I found a way to trick it into doing that, with no CDROM drive on the Windows XP machine, I would never be able to play it without the disc anyhow. It's messed up. It's weird.

[bemildred]

27. We live in a time of hyper-fast change, Dude.

And it has always been the case that 99.9% of everything is lost to History. You can't keep it all and it's dumb to try. You need to focus on preserving the really essential stuff, like life on the planet.

[hunter]

30. Whenever I build a new computer, I bring all my old computers along.

I've got files going back to the 'seventies.

The marvelous thing about open source software is that it tends to be very conservative in its file formats.

The first "real" operating system I used was BSD. I wrote most of my stuff using vi, and programmed in pascal. Then I took a detour through the various versions of Windows, up to 98SE. That's where all the file format bullshit started. When I switched to Debian (a Linux), it was like going back home.

Whenever I upgrade a computer I bring all my files from older computers with me, and I have emulators for all of them on my desktop. One or two mouse clicks and I can go back in time more than 30 years.



Here's a bit of Atari 800 silliness:



The Atari 800 was my favorite computer ever.

For what it's worth, that sort of behavior is probably an aspect of my OCD. Much of what I wrote thirty years ago is hideous.

I think bemildred above, has got it right, we ought to be afraid for all the living things on this planet. I'd rather preserve a living forest full of tigers and mountain lions than all the cute cat videos in the world.

[JCMach1]

34. Cut my teeth on Atari 800 as well

[LiberalElite]

32. NOW they tell us nt

[Pooka Fey]

33. Kicking

[RobinA]

35. Yup

I keep hard copies of everything. I also have a core of documents dating back to the late '80's that I move along as technology changes. Currently on flash drive. I'm not a computer person, so I don't know all the ins and outs, but I have worried about this since...well, the late '80's. I plan on bequeathing my descendants a box of pictures as big as the box I got from my grandparents.