The Guardian view on digital conservation: we must act now
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Version 0 of 1. Vint Cerf, one of the two fathers of the internet, is warning us again that without attention very large amounts of our digital history will simply disappear. This matters because all history, all the economy and all our bureaucracy now live on and in computer records. The obvious problem with this is that these recordings will be lost, forgotten, or simply not copied. Nothing is really safe that has not been backed up twice into two physically different places. Hard disks die, CD-roms erode in light and become unreadable in a matter of decades, tape oxidises: none of these apparently faithful means of storage can be trusted. An album of analogue prints of family photographs may fade with the years, but digital printouts will disappear altogether, and the media on which they are stored electronically will almost certainly have failed long before the people in them die. The pictures of your grandparents are going to be preserved much better than the pictures of your children or grandchildren will be. This isn’t an insurmountable problem. Assiduous librarians could in theory see to it that every important record is copied on to new media at regular intervals, and that there are always backup copies kept around. Yet simply copying the originals into new digital media is an inadequate solution. This is not because the storage available will run out. Mr Cerf assumes that it will become overwhelmingly abundant and cheap – and even if he is wrong, it is clear that if storage becomes a big problem, it will be among the smallest ones that civilisation, and even human life, will then be facing. More pressing is the disappearance of the hardware we need to read old digital media. Floppy drives are forgotten. CD-roms are heading that way too. Within 10 years, USB sticks and memory cards will be as quaint as magic lanterns. The speed of change in digital writing systems is as if we changed alphabets, or whole writing systems, every 10 or 15 years. Moving from syllabaries to pictographs then back to alphabets, then changing the direction of writing and inventing a whole new script … It’s not enough, under those rules, to preserve merely the manuscripts. Much of the earliest experiments in digital culture might as well be written in Linear A for all the use we can make of them today. Even when the hardware exists, or can be rebuilt, to read obsolete media, there is no guarantee that the software required to decode it can be reinvented. That is what Mr Cerf wants us to worry about. Technically, it is possible, and possibly already solved. It is done for things that the techie enthusiasts really care about, like old computer games: the games and the consoles to run them are all recreated in software for modern computers. But who is to do this work of loving preservation for less glamorous records? Mr Cerf warned that there will be nothing remembered of our culture and that it will appear as “an information black hole”. It would be a horrible irony if the records of the sonic hedgehog gene were lost, and Sonic the Hedgehog the game wobbled off into immortality. |