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Time and Technology Threaten Digital Archives
According to reports in the April 7th issue of The New York Times, the rapid obsolesence of storage media, and the hardware and software that store and extract data from the media, are serious threats to stored and archived data. Preserving information in digital form is far more daunting than filing sheets of paper or shelving rolls of microfilm. The problems have been studied in library, academic, and archival environments, but their implications are now becoming clear to the wider world.
The issue involves hundreds of proprietary digital storage media (and their associated hardware and software) that have been invented over the past 50 years. These range from the low capacity 1950's-vintage magnetic tape to today's read/write optical CD-ROMs. The archival problems begin with the nature of computers and storage media. Unlike microfilm and acid-fee paper, digital storage media, and their associated hardware and software typically change every few years, largely because of increased capacity. As users migrate to newer digital media and associated hardware/software systems, older media become obsolete. Not only do older digital media need to be "backed up" onto new media because of deterioration, but (typically) after 15-20 years the hardware and software used to create and edit digital data are so obsolescent that "migrating" data from older to newer digital systems is difficult or impossible.
One example of this difficulty occurs when a document created by an early version of popular word processing software onto once-common 8" floppy diskettes needs to be migrated onto "modern" digital media and converted to the most recent version of the same word processing program. But migration becomes really difficult when one attempts to find proprietary document processing hardware and software once marketed by a firm that went out of busineess a decade ago.
According to the Times, there is no surefire way to guarantee that a person or organization can preserve digital data for the next 50-100 years. Magnetic media need to be backed up about every ten years. Optical media and microfilm can last 100 years. Archival paper and ink will last hundreds of years if properly preserved. The article suggests that planning to preserve, inspect, copy, and restore data is important. So is regularly migrating data from data processing systems that are nearing obsolescence to those that are "state-of-the-art." The reports were written by Stephen Manes and appear on page C4.