The New York Times
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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."