Is Digital Data of Dubious Permanence?
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things, The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kigs: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I heard on the Typo-L list today that digital data is of dubious permanence.
I think it just works in a very different way to the permanence of physical things. Like all physical things, especially ones made of plastic, CDs deteritorate as they age. They have a much shorter life expectancy than books. (This is more true for ‘CD-R’ CDs, the ones you can copy data onto on your home computer, than for ‘Real CDs’ that are mass produced.
But digital data is more permanent than a book.
Its unintuitive, so I’ll explain:
At the machine level, at a rate today of millions of times a second, a computer processor copies 1s and 0s in from computer memory, and modifies them, and copies them out again.
At the human level, this is like loading a file, changing it, and saving it.
This core thingness, copying and modifying, is what computers do.
Computer networks, like the Internet, allow computers to copy and modify information from other computers.
Information like what a book looks like can be digitised with a scanner. Once one networked computer has a digital copy of a page, every single other computer on the network can, in almost no time and at almost zero cost, also have a copy.
“Try to pull something ‘off the web’ and you will soon realize that you wont be able to do it. Everything you write and publish will defy eternity, carved in electrons: the very moment you put something on the web, someone, somewhere, will make a copy out of it. It is bound to reappear, somewhere sometime: indestructible and redoutable powers of the void.”
So what does this mean for backup of your personal data, which you obviously don’t publish on the web and try to distribute to anyone who cares to look at it, right?
When you make a copy of personal data for backup purposes, the reason is not to make an archive - but that’s a common, mistaken, belief.
The real reason for burning off data onto a CD is that if your computer melts in a housefire, or you accidentally delete some important files, or the laptop is stolen - its almost never a virus or malware that destroys data - you still have a copy.
CDs and now DVDs are commonly believed to be the cheapest way to make a copy of your private data.
This isn’t actually true, though.
The cheapest and most secure way is to get a website account with plenty of storage space, like DreamHost, and copy all of your data over your internet connection to that website account, but ensure it is not accessible by anyone through the web. Often website hosts have a ‘web’ directory to upload files into so they will be publically available, and anything not in that folder will only be accessible from your FTP account.
There are websites that provide purely private accounts - like StrongSpace - that claim to do extra backup work at their end, so the likelyhood of you and them losing your data at the same time is really, really, really small.
Its no extra effort and a good idea to ensure this account is on a server on another continent, so a Tsunami or Katrina won’t smash all the copies.
The next cheapest way is to buy an external harddisk that connects using USB, and copy everything to that. Then, when the house is burning down, you can grab the harddisk and scarper :-) Or better yet, keep it at your neighbours house incase of theft.
If you do all 3 of these cheaper and easier things, plus make CD/DVD copies, you are most unlikely to not have at least one copy available to you, ever.
But information stored on paper is of much more dubious permanence, since its impossible for you to make 3 copies and distribute them round the house, street and country.
If its mass produced paper information, like a book, you can always buy another one - but for personal records, this is not the case. In the case of a highly specialised book, that will be of greater significance to its owner than any old pulp novel, what a personal record is becomes blurry, of course :-)
There is also “bit rot”.
Even if you take up all the recommended backup habits, in 20 years time, the file formats may have become unreadable.
For example, if you get an authorised copy of a Orange Computers’ proprietary “OrangeWorks 3” in 1987, and 20 years later, today, you want to open that file, you may find yourself out of luck.
This is why “Free File Formats” are so important, along with Free Software applications to make use of those files.
Of course, you can use an emulator to run a virtual Orange Computer, and an unauthorised copy or the 1987 version of OrangeWorks, because in 1987 there was no ‘copy protection’ locks to prevent unauthorised sharing (if you’re lucky). Today, this is less likely - even Adobe, who avoided locks for many years recently starting including them - and in 20 years, if you’re not starting to use Free File Formats, you’ll have real problems with ‘bit rot.’
A book is a lovely thing to have, but a digital copy of the information is also important so that its easy to search the book once you’ve read it. This increases the value of the book, because it more likely to fly off the shelf once its settled there. Google Books makes the indexed books more valuable.
The Is Digital Data of Dubious Permanence? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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