One Problem Solves Another

Anyone who has cassette tapes, floppy disks, or 8MM film should be concerned about the problem of data loss. Not only are the tapes, disks, and film deteriorating, but machines that can read the data are also increasingly hard to find. The phenomenon of obsolete media highlights the following general problem [bold added]:

All interfaces and formats eventually die. Data storage consultant Tom Coughlin, founder of Coughlin Associates, calls it a fight against nature, saying, "the laws of thermodynamics are against you."

Such a battle makes for a hazy long-term outlook. Will your data be accessible in 100 or even 50 years? Perhaps, but those data will likely be in different formats and will certainly be stored on different media than they are today. All modern-day technologies grow obsolete; either the hardware breaks or is replaced by something better, or new software takes over for the old, or both. In 50 years you may have a computer that can read PDFs, but you might have those PDFs stored on a medium the computer can't read. Or the opposite may happen, with data stored on a readable format but saved in long-gone file formats. The key to preventing either case is accepting the nonstop job of staying technologically up to date.

The Popular Mechanics article says that there are no easy solutions. Data can be preserved by moving it to the latest media and backing it up in more than one location. That's a lot of work and conscientiousness demanded from a public that's used to computers making our lives easier, not more difficult.

But Big Government may have a solution to the data-loss problem (it didn't set out to do that, of course).

The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone. [snip]

RT: You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?

WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data. [snip]

[President Obama] is supporting the building of the Bluffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes [blogger's note: approximately 5 billion terabytes] of data.

All your e-mails, including attachments, are preserved by the government. You can't access them today, but someday in a more open clime you or your descendants may be able to. So take the contents of your floppy disks, e-mail them to yourself, and take the disks and their drives to the electronic recycler. © 2012 Stephen Yuen