Data Rot
March 27th, 02009 by Alexander Rose
David Pogue has been doing some good reporting on digital longevity. Today he posted the transcript of an interview he did with the folks down at the Computer History Museum.
The interview does not leave us with much hope for digital data. The upside to this is that the problem will hopefully get broader attention, the downside is it doesn’t touch on the many efforts that are going on, or possible paths forward.
Here is an excerpt:
David Pogue: What is data rot?
Dag Spicer: Data rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, being stored not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read.
The second aspect of data rot is actually finding the machines to read them. And that is a real problem. If you think of the 8-track tape player, for example, basically the only way you can find 8-track cartridges is in a flea market or a garage sale.
The problem, strangely enough, is not so bad on the older stuff, but quite bad on the more recent stuff. So we can read tapes here at the museum that are 50 years old. You know, we bake the tapes first, and we extract–
DP: You bake the tapes?
DS: Yeah, we put them in an oven and we dry them out, because after time, the tape just sticks. It becomes one giant reel of goo, and you can’t just peel it apart, because then you start peeling data off the tape. So there’s a little wizardry involved in reading this stuff.
Continued over at the NYT blog…
This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under Digital Dark Age. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on March 27th, 2009 at 11:21 am
How timely since I just asked you about long-storage paper options. ;-)
Posted on March 28th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Chiseling hieroglyphics into stone blocks buried in the desert starts to sound a lot more reasonable…
Posted on March 28th, 2009 at 11:28 am
* It’s nice to see the new posts here, and thanks for making the beautiful Rosetta disk so visually accessible. I also appreciate Long Now’s presentations being available on line, but I had no luck downloading them. The MP3 for Griffith’s 2009-01-16 presentation kept loading for only 80 seconds worth. The Orlov talk (2009-02-13) got cut down to the first 13 seconds.
Pogue and Spicer’s exchange about digital “data rot” is the discouraging techno-tip of the iceberg or our common concern: cultural/historical continuity –or at least the ability to bridge over discontinuities (”dark ages”). That latter fall-back is the most likely outcome, so I think we owe it to ourselves and our heritage to build bridges. That involves the standard three tasks: to determine what it is of our essence we seek to preserve, what medium to use, and where/how to keep it safe.
Long Now’s projects are laudably designed to be nurturing of and predicated upon some degree of civilizational continuity. Whereas our “Time Capsule Tile” (TCT) project originally sought to bridge over intervening periods up to a million years, Long Now’s horizon is a more sensible 10,000 years off: about twice the distance we’re commonly aware of having come.
In the several years since we began the TCT effort, we’ve come to realize how dynamic and impermanent nearly all of the Earth’s terrain is over periods greater than 10,000 years. A time capsule is liable to get buried by watery sediment, the forest’s “carbon cycle”, subducted by the “rock cycle”, melted and blended with volcanic basalt, or turned into a pathetic smear at the base of a moving glacier.
Long Now’s mountain cave approach looks better all the time.
Posted on July 22nd, 2009 at 9:12 am
[...] you’re among those concerned with data rot, you might see a glimmer of hope for long-term digital preservation in a recent development from [...]