Rocks don't need to be backed up
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An excerpt from a thought provoking article by Henry Newman, an industry consultant with 28 years experience in high-performance computing and storage.
My wife and I were in New York’s Central Park last fall when we saw a nearly 4,000-year-old Egyptian obelisk that has been remarkably well preserved, with hieroglyphs that were clearly legible — to anyone capable of reading them, that is.
As we stood wondering at this archaeological marvel, my wife, ever mindful of how I spend the bulk of my time, blurted out, “Rocks do not need backing up!”
Luckily for me, no one backs up data to stone anymore, with the possible exception of the Rosetta project, but my wife raised an important point: electronic data storage and preservation raises a host of technological concerns that the builders of the obelisk never had to consider. Just try reading your backup tape, archived DVD or old Word file after 10 years, much less after thousands of years. Electronic data faces format, migration and data integrity issues that hard copies don’t, although they have their own preservation issues, as archaeologists and document preservation specialists could tell you.
In some ways, the Egyptians with their simpler approach were far better off than we are at recording and saving information. Just look at the well preserved obelisk as you consider all the formats you probably have lying around that can no longer be accessed, from 5.25-inch floppy disks to 8-track tapes and old home movies. What would it take to preserve those for 3,500 years?
After rocks, the human race moved on to writing on animal skins and papyrus, which were faster at recording but didn’t last nearly as long. Paper and printing presses were even faster, but also deteriorated more quickly. Starting to see a pattern? And now we have digital records, which might last a decade before becoming obsolete. Recording and handing down history thus becomes an increasingly daunting task, as each generation of media must be migrated to the next at a faster and faster rate, or we risk losing vital records.
Paper was the medium of choice until about 10 to 15 years ago. Before that, digital storage was far too expensive. Today, we store just about everything digitally, from home pictures, music and movies to feature films, medical records, documents and personal communications like e-mail. But our brave new digital world poses a number of significant problems for future generations, such as formats, frameworks, interfaces and data integrity, that need to be solved through the standards process so that our digital records can be preserved and handed down more easily. Nothing less than the preservation of our history depends on it.
Digital data management concepts, technologies and standards just do not exist today. I don’t know of anyone or anything that addresses all of these problems, and if it is not being done by a standards body, it will not help us manage the data in the long run. It is only a matter of time until a lot of data starts getting lost. A few thousand years from now, what will people know about our lives today? If we are to leave obelisks for future generations, we’d better get started now.
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