The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Did you know that we can read the journals of scientists from the 1400s and 1500s, but yet many of the documents from the Apollo space program are inaccessible? As long as the handwriting has survived and the paper lasts through the years, the information contained on the pages can be accessed by anyone. But computer technology has changed so fast that data storage quickly becomes outdated and this is a huge worry for our time. I never owned a Commodore 64 or one of the original Radio Shack computers, but they stored everything on cassette tapes. From these, we stepped up to 5.5-inch floppy disks, those huge platters. Then on to 3.25-inch floppies and eventually CDs and DVDs. We also have thumb drives, hard drives, online storage, and an array of software that needs constant updating. This means trouble. All of the digital photos that you've taken that you've got stored somewhere need to last through the years, but how will they when the options are changing so quickly? For the first few years that I had a laptop I worried about a dying hard drive. I used to make it a rule to save as few things as possible on my computer. I carted stacks of floppy disks around and worried about them malfunctioning. But like most people, as soon as I started working with photos, audio, and video, this quickly became impossible. The files were simply too large. I began using my hard drive. I worked hard for a time to burn CDs of photos and videos regularly. I even updated these CDs when newer versions of software came out and replaced the older ones in our photo box. But this habit quickly died; it was simply too much work to remember to do. Now I've gone the other way, with data spread over several computers, online blogs, a flickr account, online storage boxes and piles of CDs and DVDs. Now I simply wonder about where stuff is and how I will find it when I need it. Companies like Google and Apple are taking this problem seriously as they know their customers will be very unhappy in the long term if they can't get to their baby pictures. Many companies are working on methods they are calling cloud storage, the ability to save your stuff online and leave it there for years. The online migration of data is happening quickly and massively with more software being online, but this still won't help you get your pictures 10 years from now. If you store your pictures, letters, and videos of your kids online with a company that is looking ahead, your data should be safe, but will it be readable? This is the problem with a lot of computer data from the '50s. First of all, the machines no longer exist to even read the information Ð they all hit the landfills long ago. Second, the computer languages are outdated. If we could rebuild the machines, who would know how to program them? Placing data online should take care of a few basic problems. It should keep our data stored safely for years to come. We will be able to access it. This leaves the software problem. How can we ensure our machines will be able to read the files? Will Quick Time, version 153, still read Quick Time 5 files? The simple answer is, no one knows. Right now, most software is backwards compatible, meaning that newer versions of software will open things produced by older versions. But this only holds true for about 10 years. For example, many files made by machines that started on Windows 95 are starting to be difficult. Some software will open files, others will not. The best bet is to simply ensure that you open all of your files occasionally so that any old files will be moved to newer versions. Now take this problem and multiply it by the billion people who are on the Internet. Are we all losing our personal histories? ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
