Bench Press

Having spent the past couple weeks helping pack up and move the lab. I noticed my lab had an abundance of ancient data storage devices. Various floppy/zip disks and future museum pieces (Macintosh LC anybody?) were found hiding in all manner of locations. While I’m certain that we have paper copies of any data that could be found in those disks and computers archiving or even simply accessing the data on many of them might be impossible today.

An article from Physorg.com discusses the potential of a “digital dark age” resulting from an unintended consequence of continued technological innovation. Much like the inaccessible data that I found during my lab’s move, society’s rapid digital advancement has rendered it vulnerable to what Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign terms a “digital dark age”. The whole article is fascinating as it details several potential data black holes. A few interesting examples:

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world’s computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA’s 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

It’s a shame that valuable data from, not only a historic event, but also one of such exploratory significance is now lost forever. McDonough goes on to talk about the potential loss of political and popular culture due to data obsolescence and closed platforms.

McDonough also cited Obama’s political advertising inside the latest editions of the popular videogames “Burnout Paradise” and “NBA Live” as an example of something that ought to be preserved for future generations but could possibly be lost because of the proprietary nature of videogames and videogame platforms.

“It’s not a matter of just preserving the game itself. There are whole parts of popular and political culture that we won’t be able to preserve if we can’t preserve what’s going on inside the gaming world.”

McDonough’s discussion of videogames is only the tip of the iceberg. The enormous amount of user generated content that currently provides so much amusement (youtube, failblog, etc…) is a large part of modern culture and it’d be a shame if measures aren’t taken to ensure that future generations have access to it. Hopefully we’ll heed the warnings of information scientists like McDonough and begin making progress towards protecting our digital information by attempting to future proof as best as possible.

Personally after sorting through and moving the “digital archives” of my lab I’m ready to start taking some steps to future proof my digital existence.

Steps that I plan on taking:

• Reducing my reliance on proprietary file formats (bye bye Word).
• Duplicating my backups onto various media periodically.
• Migrating to new storage technologies, such as “the cloud” (Google engineers can figure out how to keep my data safe, right?)
• Make sure this blog’s future proof =).

Any suggestions on other steps I could take?