Anybody who knows me knows that I am a pretty big movie buff. As long as I can remember, film has been something that I love. As an extension to that, I am a total geek when it comes to film preservation and restoration. Nobody does it better than Robert A. Harris. His articles are fascinating to me. I am amazed at how delicate film from the turn of the century can be preserved and then restored for a pristine DVD release, looking as good as or better than it did during theatrical exhibition. The preservation of historical documents is equally interesting. We have centuries-old historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Magna Carta that are simply frail pieces of parchment. We have turn of the century photographs etched in tin. We have the Code of Hammurabi and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that have survived millennia. But what about our current important documents, photos and media files? What happens to digital media once the format in which it is saved becomes obsolete or there are no devices around to access the physical media?
I really got thinking about this the other day when I found a CD I created back in December 1998. I got my first computer with graduation money in May of 1998. The sole purpose of which was to play Age of Empires (great game, by the way). In December, I made my first backup – to a CD-R. I recently found that disc when we moved and only last week actually popped it into my laptop. The physical disc itself was fine. My drive read it with no problems. I looked through all the old files – stuff like small mp3 files of music in horrible quality, html files riddled with ugly .gif images, a few pictures of graduation and other miscellaneous items. What interested me most though were a handful of Real Audio files and my old AOL personal folder backup. When I got my first computer, I initially used an AOL email address associated with my parents’ AOL account. The file contains whatever random email I sent and received at the time. The problem is that I really do not want to install AOL onto any of my machines. So, I did some digging. There are some options out there that will convert a .pfc file to other, more accessible formats. The question is: will there always be such opportunities? Fifty years from now, will there even be enough interest in accessing .pfc files to warrant someone writing code on future computers to read the data? The same goes for the Real Audio files. I despise both the Real Audio format and especially the software. It is also a dead/dying format. Again, in the future, will it be possible to access audio information “preserved” in Real Audio?
This is a major problem. I am sure you have heard stories about children and grandchildren discovering the love letters written between their parents or grandparents decades earlier. Maybe they find old black and white pictures of family members that have long since passed away. Yes, people still do write correspondence with pen and paper today and they do take actual photographs, but so much communication is now sent electronically via email and so many pictures taken are digital. What will future generations know about us? What will be available for them to find about us? It might be little more than ones and zeroes that are difficult or near impossible to access. “Sorry. When they were dating, Mom used some old email program called Thunderbird, and Dad used something called Outlook. How in the world are we supposed to read this?” Sadly, I expect such conversations will be all too real in the not too distant future.
The same concern exists for the physical media. How long will recordable CDs or DVDs last? There has been some investigation into this and many experts believe that a properly-protected optical disc could last decades. (Here is a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in .pdf format) However, even if the physical media is viable, will there still be hardware that can access the data? How many 5 ? floppy drives do you have lying around your house?
I have always been a bit of a digital packrat for these reasons. OK, I am a packrat in general anyway. I backup everything and attempt to keep my files current. For example, I want to export that old AOL mail to Outlook’s .pst format. However, I also should probably export it and my current Outlook mail to .txt format since it is at least more universally-readable. I make numerous backups on different media and upgrade file formats when possible.
Converting to a new format is a fine option for text or character-based information, but what about audio and video files? Most of our audio and video files are already compressed in some manner. MP3 files are the most popular audio format and it is heavily compressed. What if MP3 becomes antiquated and obsolete? Sure, we could convert our .mp3 files to the newer format, but that will almost inevitably result in an additional quality loss. This does not seem like a viable or acceptable option. If you own the original CD, you could re-rip to the new format directly, but that does you no good if you obtained the files through iTunes or some other digital deliver mechanism.
That brings up yet another question. What about DRM? Digital Rights Management prevents you from converting your purchased digital files from one format to another. That puts the end user in the position of needing to crack the DRM encryption in order to move to a new format. This is a potentially-illegal option, thanks to a ridiculous provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. There is no truly good alternative that I can see.
I am honestly not sure what the best method of dealing with the problem of digital obsolescence is. When it comes to important correspondence, it might not be a bad idea to save it off to a .txt format. At least that has a decent chance of being readable in the future. This just screams for the necessity of standards when it comes to file formats. Media files? I don’t like any of the options there. Just hope that future software provides backwards-compatibility? I would certainly not be fond of re-encoding already compressed files to new formats.
We are told that there is more information available today than in all of previous human history combined. However, I worry about the permanence of our most personal and important records – records of who we are or were. I have no doubt that the internet will adapt and our children will always be able to look up both interesting and trivial information online. But what will they know about us? What will they know about their parents when our email correspondence has long since evaporated into inaccessible ones and zeroes and our JPEG family albums were lost in a hard drive crash or the format goes out of use? We must do our best to adapt and preserve our personal digital information. Otherwise, we risk becoming lost to future generations.
I know I am not the first person to discuss this issue. It has been brought up numerous times online and in real-world discussion forums. It is just something that I have been thinking about recently. I am also not in any way trying to be pessimistic about technology. I love it and the opportunities it provides to preserve and disseminate history. As someone who is passionate about both technology and history, I only want to encourage anyone who reads this to be sure that you take steps to ensure that the information that matters most is available for future generations.
Digital Preservation Case Study
Saved: What Death Can’t Destroy and How to Preserve It (older but interesting)
Tags: digital obsolescence, file formats, history, preservation, standards
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