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Comment "We need copies. Lots of copies." (Score 1) 287

by sfled (#31254294) Attached to: Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

Seriously. Many copies. Multiple, ad-nauseum uber redundancy. And, so what about that DRM crap? Is it _that_ important to preserve pop music? If so, when did DRM ever stop us? Burn a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and then RIP it, upload the thing. Put it on a hardened RAID, what...ever.

True, technology is an ever more complex cycle. I guess we should try to get the info/code down to lowest common denominator. Text? If so, what language? Boggles the mind..but if the unthinkable happens then maybe we can assist the great minds millenia hence rediscover what we did. What we did right, and how to avoid what we did wrong.

So I repeat, whatever the content is, tech records can be fragile. To paraphrase, "We need copies. Lots of copies."
Data Storage

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age 287

Posted by kdawson from the you-must-remember-this dept.
al0ha writes to recommend a worthwhile piece up at American Scientist on the problems of archiving and data preservation in an age where all data are stored digitally. "It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the 'digital dark age.' This is the idea — or fear! — that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us. ... Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it."

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