Uhm no, actually it's Eastman!
Posted on 11/29/2004 8:47:34 AM PST by Dr. Zzyzx
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 past 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 3 1/2-inch diskettes, even the larger 5-inch floppy disks from the 1980s. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CDs and other backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CDs 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, 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 stop-gap 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, 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 Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence. Over the years, Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like CDs and DVDs. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm sentimental about," he said.
Yet Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CDs, 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," 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 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, 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 Schwartz., whose company has worked with the Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.
"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," Schwartz 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 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," 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, 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? 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. Quinn has a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an eclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980s, when he started out on an Amstrad computer. All of 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," 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 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."
Could you go into a little more detail as to who does this and an approximate cost? Thanks!
Never heard of an 11" floppy and I've been in the computer biz for 30 years ... but then again, who knows, perhaps they did exist and never really made it to prime time.
Eight inch was a standard for a long time, with RadioShack I believe and then IBM's 'DataMaster' as well as their 3740 key to disk system. 5&1/4 had a much longer life time with the advent of the PC.
Print your images, line them up on a wall or bulletin board and then shoot them on motion picture film. Transfer the film to videotape as a backup and leave the tail end of the tape out.
>I also wonder about polaroid images. Are the originals made 60 years ago still stable? <
The Polaroid photos my family took in the late 1950's - early 1960's are really deteriorating. Some are almost totally destroyed.
It's a shame, too. My dad loved his Polaroid, and used it a lot to record family events.
It has been a few years since I patronized that service. This was at least 7 years ago, at the beginnng of the digital image explosion.
It was not cheap, but at the time the images I had to deal with were priceless. I am sure the cost has come down by a factor of at least 5.
The specific service I used was The Darkroom, in San Rafael, California.
Any image over 5 mb can produce a paper print as big as you'll ever need. Any good Lab can transform the electronic images to 6x6 negatives or positives. Let us know if you can find current prices. 7 years ago it was about $8 an image, if I remember correctly.
Call you local camera store and tell them you want a negative from a digital image file. They can send you to the right people. I won't guess on the price, but a phone call to a good camera store is free. :)
Apples and oranges.
The people who worry the most, like the Library of Congress and worldwide banks, are not amused by the uncertainty of the current technology. On the other hand, I am sure they would not worry if they could record the billions of daily transactions with paint on cave walls. If they could.
Does WordStar support a "print to file" format? If so you can print to a floppy.
Alternatively you rig a cable from the printer port on the old computer to the new so that the print command will send the data to the hard drive on your target computer.
Uhm no, actually it's Eastman!
I'm sorry, I forgot to add my /sarcasm tag.
I sure would like to be able to retrieve my collage work from my old 5” floppies – done on a Commodore. The trusty Commodore died, and with it the ability to read the disks.
BUMP
The most permanent solution for this problem is to print out a hex or octal dump of every single file you are keeping, and a rosetta stone file as to how to decipher the dumps, and keep that stack of paper in a nice, dry, fireproof storage safe. There you go... that will assure that archivists a thousand years from now will be able to look at your photos and other documents.
(I wonder how many trees and iron ore mines I would have to kill)
Color Polaroid images have a well known propensity for blue shift. I was one of those people who had to have the camera, and I got the folding one and spent lots of money on film packs. Great concept, I still have them, but to make them look good, I have to scan them in and Photoshop them.
My feeling is, the benefits of digital far outweigh the disadvantages, in my case at least. I am immersed in the digital end of things, I understand formats and migration.
I have my files backed up on two separate hard drives, I have them all archived and burned to DVD's which I have placed in my Safe Deposit Box at my bank.
But these are all good points people make. I will wait until the 3D Transparent Cubic storage units come out, because they will certainly last for a thousand years...:)
Print out and scan with Textbridge or a similar program.
Here is a real life solution (I hope). Basic home networks can now be set up with routers from Wal-mart. A wireless G network can now be created for less than $125. I migrated all the important files from the old machine to the new one at 54 Mbps. Now we run the two systems as backups of each other. I too don't trust digital media, but with this system, I can keep the data alive. Also, Wal-mart has free software to print pictures at the local store right from your home computer. Did the digital print at home thing, what a disaster. Now I get Fuji paper and ink and can pick them up at my convenience. One hour photos without the trip to drop stuff off. Too Cool.
Carolyn
Your ATT probably has an RS232 Port. You can use a null-modem serial cable, connect it to your PC, and send your data over the cable. Use HyperTerminal on your PC, HyperTerminal is included with every version of Windows.
Hopefully, you have a terminal proggy on your ATT. Chances are at least fair that you do.
Possibly, WordStar can print to a serial printer. If that is the case, you can still print from your ATT through your serial port. The printed files, which will likely be in "clear text" or ASCII, can be received by HyperTerminal. Save the received data to your hard drive... or copy-and-paste in to Word or whatever.
Many ancient printers were RS-232... So there is a good chance that this would work.
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