November 10, 2004
Even Digital Memories Can Fade
By KATIE HAFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/technology/10archive.html?th=
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/technology/10archive.html?th=&adxnnl=1&or
ef=login&adxnnlx=1100077866-6i35bFgs6/sYjT7jDywQqw>
&adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1100077866-6i35bFgs6/sYjT7jDywQqw
The New York Times
The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal
treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers,
the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for
the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of
digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take a
lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management Services, a
consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional photograph and
just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work." Already, half of all
photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the shots never
leaving a personal computer's hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that
the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming committees
and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for digital
preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library
of Congress, said the library, faced with "a deluge of digital information,"
had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward
creating uniform standards for preserving digital material so that it can be
read in the future regardless of the hardware or software being used. The
assumption is that machines and software formats in use now will become
obsolete sooner rather than later.
"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest
corporations all the way down to individuals," said Ken Thibodeau, director
for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives and
Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and
den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and
3½-inch diskettes, even the larger 5¼-inch floppy disks from the 1980's.
Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their
materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD's and other
backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD's and
hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with
a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed
to extremes in humidity or temperature.
And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become unusable. Unlike,
say, faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital file becomes
corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.
"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and
moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey
Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of
Denver.
Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate
materials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trapped
in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they
are forced to devise their own stopgap measures, most of them unwieldy,
inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.
Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San
Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he was in
elementary school, Mr. Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school
work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail since college.
Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of
photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.
Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has
continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage
formats like CD's and DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff
I'm sentimental about," he said.
Yet Mr. Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CD's, especially the
rewritable variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a year and a
half ago they started to deteriorate, and become unreadable," he said.
And of course, migration works only if the data can be found, and with ever
more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.
"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed
but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to find the photo
album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all
sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"
For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the bin under
the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach to archiving,
means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.
Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=FORR> Research,
for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box. The
machine contains everything in his life from the day he married in 1997 to
the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve
anything from the old PC, Mr. Yates said, it would require a great deal of
wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get
it to boot up," he said.
Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializes
in long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now, the museum
approach might be the most feasible answer.
"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable you'll be able to go
to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient computer
available," said Mr. Schwartz, whose company has worked with the Library of
Congress on its preservation efforts.
"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," he said. "There's going to
be a whole industry of people who will have shops of old machines, like the
original Mac Plus."
Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is the
printout method.
Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, Los
Angeles, has been using computers since elementary school. She creates her
own Web sites and she spends much of her day online.
Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set at her parents'
house 100 miles away.
"As much as a lot of people think print will be dead because of computers,"
she said, "I actually think there's something about the tangibility of paper
that feels more comforting."
Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes to
preserving photographs. If stored properly, conventional color photographs
printed from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading. Newer
photographic papers can last up to 200 years.
There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a hard drive.
Today's formats are likely to become obsolete and future software "probably
will not recognize some aspects of that format," Mr. Thibodeau said. "It may
still be a picture, but there might be things in it where, for instance, the
colors are different."
The experts at the National Archives, like those at the Library of Congress,
are working to develop uniformity among digital computer files to eliminate
dependence on specific hardware or software.
One format that has uniformity, Mr. Thibodeau pointed out, is the Web, where
it often makes no difference which browser is being used.
Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular archiving method,
especially when it comes to photos.
Shutterfly.com and Ofoto .com have hundreds of millions of photographs on
their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup set of each photo sent to the
site.
The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the fault line," said
David Bagshaw, chief executive of Shutterfly.
But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out of business?
Mr. Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side, but offered this
bit of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'll always
make people's images available to them."
Constant mobility can be another issue.
Stephen Quinn, who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie,
Ind., moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to keep the amount of
paper in his life to a minimum, and rarely makes printouts.
Dr. Quinn keeps a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an
eclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980's, when he
started out on an Amstrad computer.
All of Dr. Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable" he says) and
other writings are on those various digital devices, along with his daily
diaries.
At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for his
children, but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad disks
more than 20 years ago.
He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer.
"I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read it with," Dr.
Quinn said.
That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever solution people
might use, it is sure to be temporary.
"We will always be playing catch up," said Dr. Rutenbeck, who is working at
pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives and stacks of old
Zip disks.
"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't keep a box of
everything I did in first grade."
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