How to save our data for the future
matthew2First seen in The Conversation, Matthew Woollard, Director of the UK Data Service, considers how much we are prepared to pay to ensure that digital stuff today is usable in the future.
“The internet is forever.” So goes a saying regarding the impossibility of removing material – such as stolen photographs – permanently from the web. Yet paradoxically the vast and growing digital sphere laos rcs data faces enormous losses. Google has been criticised for failing to ensure access to its archive of Usenet newsgroup postings that stretch back to the early 1980s. And now internet pioneer Vint Cerf has warned of a “digital dark age” that would result if decades of data – emails, photographs, website postings – becoming lost or un-readable.
Discs
Image – Floppies: storage that’s about as reliable as a CD used as a frisbee. orangejack, CC BY-NC-SA
Millions of paper records more than 500 years old exist today. But your entire family photo collection could be lost forever with just a single hard drive failure. Stone tablets, parchment, paper, printed photographs have all lasted through the centuries. But some of our data may not. What do we do about preserving the digital deluge.