back to article Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life's work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters. That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I've been writing on and for the web pretty much since …

  1. SVD_NL Silver badge

    DRM is the biggest threat to conservation

    Almost every piece of media posted online these days is protected by some form of DRM. While the use of DRM is a massive discussion best saved for another day, one apparent downside here is that by preventing copies from being made, you prevent copies from being made!

    As an artist, what is your priority? Making money now, or creating a legacy? The hard reality of life is, that more often than not you are forced to choose the former option. If you even get to make that choice yourself, because many artists, especially musicians, are bound to a publisher who will obviously make that decision for you.

    I'd love to see a world where everyone can follow their passion, make every decision the way they want to, and live happily ever after, but the realist (or pessimist) in me has accepted that we simply can't have that.

    And a little question to think about for yourself and maybe have an existential crisis about: Do you even want to be remembered? Why do you want that? Why should people remember you? There's a vast amount of people who turned into dust without a single trace of their existence surviving, what makes you special?

    If thinking about those questions pissed you off, use it as a catalyst to make that change. Or, just like many of us, live your life to your happiest, and take every day as it comes. You don't need to be special, you just need to be yourself.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: DRM is the biggest threat to conservation

      "As an artist, what is your priority? Making money now, or creating a legacy?"

      Making money, leaving a legacy, or being ripped off by a machine that can churn out mediocre clones of your work every second...

      "You don't need to be special, you just need to be yourself."

      Upvote for the sentiment, but only it were that easy. As a neurodivergent, I've had many years and an entire childhood of people offering their opinions about how I'm not like them therefore there's something wrong with me. I'm not upset, I stopped giving a shit decades ago, but the fact is that for some people, others being themselves rubs them up the wrong way - and they'll be quite vocal about it.

    2. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: DRM is the biggest threat to conservation

      The same, indeed applies to software.

      If you have an old piece of software whose vendor/author is long dead, you can usually get it working somehow, in Wine or in a VM for example. But if it used DRM, you are shit out of luck.

      e.g. my dad uses a PC "Virtual Pipe Organ" called Hauptwerk. It's vendor is still around, but only supports a newer version that my dad would have to pay again for, and wouldn't get along with the new interface anyway. His old version uses a USB Sentinel HASP DRM dongle, and although the program works perfectly in Wine including MIDI input etc, it will only function in trial mode, due to Wine not seeing the DRM dongle (actually, I will give it another try since there have been improvements to WineUSB since I last tried, but it's pretty doubtful since the DRM uses a system service, and possibly a Windows kernel-mode driver)

      So when Microsoft kills Win10, he might not be able to play his sampled copy of Salisbury Cathedral anymore, which would be sad.

      1. RichardBarrell

        Re: DRM is the biggest threat to conservation

        A certain amount of reverse engineering is a moral imperative since there is no other way we'll be able to preserve copy protected software.

        1. veti Silver badge

          Re: DRM is the biggest threat to conservation

          Same question applies: why preserve it at all? New software gets created all the time. Some of it (relative proportion open to considerable debate) is better than its predecessors. Why should we try to keep Pinball from Windows 95 going?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Make copies...

    The cost of copying ancient texts - and indeed paintings - was enormous. The decision to do it was dependent on the item already having been assessed as of value and whoever commissioned the copy would have already decided where to keep it.

    We're in a somewhat different environment now. Records of ephemera far outnumber the records the classical world would have considered preserving. And (fires aside), they're more fragile - they need periodic format-shifting or recopying. And they need to be given an identifiable home where they will be preserved and found. All that, in the end, requires money and someone to make the effort.

    So, before going to the trouble of making those copies, identify who's going to make that effort in future and where they're going to find the time and money. You might find you're spared the effort.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Make copies...

      Look at YouTube, videos are disappearing because the account became inactive, in spite of Google previously promising to keep everything online. Google arguably have the time and the money to keep videos but chose not to.

      1. Gene Cash Silver badge

        Re: Make copies...

        It's not just because accounts are inactive. For example, Big Clive had to remove his livestreams because one of his friends is a local gov't employee and one of the viewers was using the videos to make life difficult for him.

        I've also seen channels go "I want to do X instead of Y" and then privatize/delete all their old "Y content"

        I download videos anyway because of the ads, and because I want to use a real video player instead of that embedded browser shite.

        Normally I delete them, but if I do find it really interesting, I keep it.

        1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

          Re: Make copies...

          "I've also seen channels go "I want to do X instead of Y" and then privatize/delete all their old Y content"

          So long as it's their own content, then I have no problem with that, they can do what they want with it and if they choose to take it down, that's fine.

          "Normally I delete them, but if I do find it really interesting, I keep it."

          I get why you would do that, but at the risk of being a legal pedant, that might be illegal. I don't know where you are in the world but in the UK, the law on copyright permits making a copy for time shifting or format shifting but in relation to "broadcasts", making a copy for long term retention is probably illegal. Whether a YouTube video counts as a broadcast, I have no idea.

          1. SVD_NL Silver badge

            Re: Make copies...

            In the Netherlands, you are always allowed to store copyrighted works for personal use.

            There is even a mandatory fee applied whenever you purchase a digital storage device, with proceeds being distributed to artists with registered copyrightable works. this mainly applies to film and music.

            I'm also not sure how this works in different countries.

            1. ICL1900-G3 Silver badge

              Re: Make copies...

              Having lived there myself for quite a while, I would be inclined to think that most things work better in NL, certainly better than in the UK. A most pragmatic country.

            2. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

              Re: Make copies...

              As far as I am aware, the same is true in Canada. Downloading a copy of something you own is perfectly fine, even if you bought the VHS tapes and are downloading 4k content.

              But you are TOAST if you upload anything.

            3. veti Silver badge

              Re: Make copies...

              Not quite true. You can store music, videos, pictures, text that way, provided they were legally acquired and copied in the first place; but software and games are specifically excluded from that permission.

  3. Tim99 Silver badge

    Long term digital documents

    In the 1980s, I was running a project where we were legally required to keep data relating to health for 75 years - The likely maximum expected lifespan of the adult subjects. The data came off computers, so we looked at digital storage. IBM recommended the then-new WORM (Write Once Ready Many times) drives and disks. We bought some and diligently archived 3 copies, including one off-site. About 4 years later, they told us that their "secure forever" disks were failing.

    I copied everything into simple plain text files and printed multiple copies onto acid-free archive-grade paper. We continued to archive onto paper and made sure we had digital copies on multiple hard drives. The organisation was privatized about 10 years later. I had left and suspect that the data was "quietly forgotten".

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Long term digital documents

      That data would today no doubt fit on a single USB stick, or could be stored for the remaining decades in the cloud some big company that's guaranteed to be around then (Amazon or Microsoft) for pennies a day. Maybe they'd even make a deal allowing them to prepay for the full remaining term of the 75 years.

      The problem is that today that data would be orders of magnitude bigger, so the cloud is probably the only reasonable alternative for something you'd need to keep until 2100, but someone is going to have to keep track of the access information and make sure the bill is paid each month. And that information would need to be passed along to future owners, assuming they care about preserving that data.

      1. Richard 12 Silver badge

        Re: Long term digital documents

        "The cloud" is just someone else's computer. It doesn't solve the problem in the slightest.

        If your livelihood depends on that data surviving, then trusting a single third party to do this is most unwise unless that third party has an enforceable liability similar to the value of the data.

        Every cloud supplier has occasionally "lost" entire buckets of data, and paid out almost nothing - in some cases actually nothing - in compensation for that loss.

        Worse, what happens when you need to change supplier later? Can you copy everything to the new one?

        1. StewartWhite Bronze badge

          Re: Long term digital documents

          "Worse, what happens when you need to change supplier later? Can you copy everything to the new one?"

          Supplier answer "Sure you can, but it's gonna cost you $$$$$"

          1. DS999 Silver badge

            Re: Long term digital documents

            Its just data, there are no $$$$ required. You don't have to hire consultants to copy your data off Amazon's cloud onto Microsoft's cloud. Even the greenest PFY could accomplish that task without difficulty.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Long term digital documents

              I forget what the usual term really is, but... "Exit fees"

            2. MonkeyJuice Bronze badge

              Re: Long term digital documents

              If I have 2 petabytes of data on AWS, and want to read them back out to put on Azure, I would have to pay data transfer fees both ways. There is no way I can simply drive up to the datacentre and grab it, despite being the legal owner of said data.

              In the cloud, everything, from listing the contents of a bucket, to renaming a file, to read or to write, comes at a price.

              1. DS999 Silver badge

                Re: Long term digital documents

                I never said it was free. Neither are backup tapes, nor the time required to make them, or the cost to transfer them to a secure location like Iron Mountain, or the cost for Iron Mountain to maintain them. You'll find the AWS solution (with a secondary backup cloud) comes out FAR cheaper than the backup tapes + Iron Mountain solution for archiving. Ask me how I know.

                1. Alan Brown Silver badge

                  Re: Long term digital documents

                  Who says Iron mountain maintain them?

                  Have you ever tried to get an archival set BACK from them?

                  I'm fairly sure their storage site is the same one the BOFH uses

        2. DS999 Silver badge

          Re: Long term digital documents

          Who said you had to trust a single one?

          Nowhere was it claimed anyone's "livelihood" depended on this data surviving 75 years. If it did, then you'd put it on two different clouds, to avoid the very tiny possibility that major cloud providers can't get replication correct.

        3. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: Long term digital documents

          "If your livelihood depends on that data surviving"

          The real problems start happening when your livlighihood no longer depends on that (ie: retirement, etc)

          Old knowledge is ephemeral and even if written down isn't guaranteed to be preserved long-term

      2. RAMChYLD

        Re: Long term digital documents

        > fit on a single USB stick

        The problem here is USB sticks uses Flash NAND just like SSDs. And Flash NAND suffers from bit-rot if it's powered down long enough. Usually there's some form of error correction that ensures that the file is still readable somehow, but it's not perfect and sticks that have been inactive for decades will potentially have gathered enough bit-rot that the data is irrecoverable.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Long term digital documents

          And, if preserving the files is important enough, you would deal with this by copying it onto new media from time to time. Archives do this all the time, including with paper, where they may make copies of documents. Those copies can be used by the public while the fragile originals are kept secure, and those copies can be copied so you always have an available copy and never have to go to the original. Of course, keeping around an original which you are never willing to touch is expensive, and sometimes an archive can manage just fine without one in the first place, simply copying copies to preserve and access. It's not that a USB disk is sufficient for storing a file forever, but that even if you have to buy a new one and copy it over with redundant copies every decade, it's not very expensive. It's even less expensive if you include it with the rest of your archives which you store on disks or tapes.

      3. veti Silver badge

        Re: Long term digital documents

        USB sticks fail. And I doubt if Amazon offers a 75-year guarantee option. Would be hard to price.

        The real question is, is anyone ever going to want to see this data, and if so, under what conditions? If access is meant to be general and unredacted, then printed paper takes a lot of beating. Vacuum seal it in a steel box, and it'll be safe from fire, flood and vermin.

        But if access is only granted to specific records, or to generate statistical analyses, that's not going to cut it, you need an electronic archive.

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Long term digital documents

      The failure there is expecting to save something once and be done with it.

      Even if those disks lasted forever they'd be impossible to read due to lack of the correct interfaces (I've encountered this with someone who has a garage FULL of old NASA 9-track tapes and no way of reading them - looking into the issue I was quoted $250 per reel by a specialist who has old drives - and with over 10,000 reels involved it's a non-starter

      Data has to be migrated periodically. In the old days that's most of what monks were doing with manuscripts (rather famously most couldn't read, which is where errors creep in)

      In a lot of cases, when a new science project starts, it adopts and extends existing datasets as they only make up a small percentage of the volume of what's expected to be gathered, but I know of several projects which have ended up abandoned due to lack of funding - including stereoscopic mapping of theMoon at 1 foot resolution and Mars at 3ft

      This isn't new. I can put you to thousands of shelf-feet of PhD theses gathering dust. Eventually they'll end up binned unread due to space requirements

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Backups, Off-site Copies, Testing....Sigh!!

    Quote: ".....Make countless copies....."

    Wise advice......but surely the main point of the piece is that many people (or organisations) don't even make ONE copy.

    ......or if they do make ONE copy, they keep that copy NEXT TO THE ORIGINAL!

    ......and on the subject of backups (of the digital kind), many people (or organisations) don't even TEST each backup to see if it is reliable......

    So much material......so much risk.....so many poor procedures everywhere!

    1. veti Silver badge

      Re: Backups, Off-site Copies, Testing....Sigh!!

      "Make countless copies" is terrible advice. Now you're converting your life's work into a pollution and disposal problem. That's no way to be remembered.

  5. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Trollface

    Your life's work is cactus

    This seems to be an longstanding problem: bunch of brainiacs in ancient times had copies of their publications stored in the Great Library of Alexandra and some barbarian came along and sacked the place. Should have used clay tablets. Or you thought you had everything down in hieroglyphics and some fundamentalist comes along and bulldozes the place.

    1. mirachu Bronze badge

      Re: Your life's work is cactus

      i don't think there ever was a Library of Alexandra that was famous. Alexandria OTOH...

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    the Theosophical Society

    . . has now met reality. And it bites.

    An interesting article.

    I will have no legacy to leave, I am but a mere business programmer. In the best case, in twenty years from now, someone will be tasked with reviewing some code and find my name in the author string.

    I don't care. I have a loving wife and a daughter that adores me, and that is what is important to me.

    If, however, I were an artist, I might have some issue with the legacy of my work. That said, if the Internet Archive is a Good Thing(TM), apparently YouTube does a great job keeping artists' work alive, so all is not lost.

  7. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    MS Fnd in a Lbry

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry

    And the actual text here: https://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html

    1. deadlockvictim

      Re: MS Fnd in a Lbry

      Thanks for this. It has brightened my morning.

    2. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      Re: MS Fnd in a Lbry

      Bit of fun number crunching:

      That Wikipedia page mentions a challenge set by Richard Feynman to squeeze a page of A4 down by a factor of 25,000, highlighting the explosion in data storage that the new computing paradigm of the time would require.

      Just messing around with some numbers and assuming Feynman meant a page of A4 text. If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.

      This corresponds to a data shrinkage of a factor of about 200million over 65 years. Or to put it another way, a factor of about 2.4 every year. Not too far off from Moore's Law.

      1. Grunchy Silver badge

        Re: MS Fnd in a Lbry

        “ If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.”

        8 bits per character? Depending on the zip algorithm, you might be able to compress text by a factor of 10x.

        (If I was gonna archive a million books or so, why not exploit lossless compression?)

  8. Bebu sa Ware
    Childcatcher

    Interesting

    I was surprised the Theosophical Society's archive were stored in CA.US as I would have imagined India or possibly London.

    Don't encounter Theosophy much nowadays but was a bit more pervasive a century ago. Even the subsequent Mary Poppins† books had elements of their ideas in them. Having just read Sax Rohmer's Grey Face it just occurred to me while reading this article that there was also a fair serving in that title‡.

    The tragedy is that these incinerated documents will destroy literary evidence of the links between Theosophy and the writers, artists, intellectuals and leaders of that time which would likely restrict our understanding leading to even more unfortunate misinterpretations of the history of the early twentieth century. They were crazy irrational times which resonate with our own.

    Digital archiving just doesn't happen in most organisations. Purely as a matter of form, records or data is often retained in unsatisfactory accommodation on media for short lived technologies eg Magneto-optical drives often in peculiar formats. Filing cabinets of zip drives, 8"/5.25"/3.5" floppies etc etc.

    Paper records often aren't treated any better.

    I am amused by the the fact that nearly 50 year old microfiche indifferently stored can still be reliably read with what is a rather low tech fiche reader. I assume this is also the case with microfilm. The lesson is that access technology has to be persistent.

    History would suggest sheep skin vellum and oak gall ink is a long term archival technology. :)

    † P.L.Travers' friendship with A.E.Russell is the connection.Less so with George Gurdjieff

    ‡ Arthur Henry Ward was apparently immersed a wide variety of mysticism and Theosophy

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Interesting

      I'm half a century old. Last winter I was looking at an scanning 35mm negatives of photos that my mom took before I was born, stored in those little plastic wallets in a carrier bag in a damp old house for a quarter of a century.

      As for floppy discs half as old... nope. Some CD-Rs only a quarter as old have already given up and turned into confetti.

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

        Re: Interesting

        I've recently scanned a few negatives and slides from around 30 years ago. Whilst all were stored together, there's been various states of fading. Kodachromes showed the least..

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: Interesting

          It's the negatives from the 70s which have suffered the most. The C47 process is unstable in the long term and they eventually fade out entirely

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Interesting

      "History would suggest sheep skin vellum and oak gall ink is a long term archival technology."

      Oak gall tends to fade a bit. Carbon black ink is better.

      1. Tim99 Silver badge

        Re: Interesting

        Cuneiform?

      2. Ken Shabby Bronze badge
        Boffin

        Re: Interesting

        Bugger it, lithograph it on a tiny chip and stick it on the Mona Lisa

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There was a great line in Hill Street Blues

    about a burning flame on an officers mothers memorial that had gone out after 6 months

    "You paid for the perpetual. You needed to order the eternal"

    Suggesting the scriptwriters went on to work for Google.

  10. Filippo Silver badge

    >Copying is how life itself beats death.

    Sort of. The really good bits of information, things like how to run basic cellular metabolism, have survived billions of years, and will likely survive until the Sun goes nova. Possibly longer, if we ever get serious about spaceflight. They are encoded in DNA, get copied all the time, and they are important enough that any error in copying always results in quick death.

    Most of the rest... eh, they can last quite a bit, but entropy eventually wins out. For the crappy bits, entropy wins out really quickly. Life itself has not figured out a way to store everything forever.

    That song that is only available on Spotify, that video that only exists on YouTube, that novel that's DRMed and that nobody cares enough to crack... they will disappear, and there is not much we can do about it. We do not have the resources to make everything redundant. If we did, we wouldn't have the resources to keep it redundant indefinitely. If we did, we most certainly would not have the resources to index it in a useful way - and once something can only ever be found, at best, at the 97th page of the results of an obscure search query, it's as good as gone.

    On the other hand, Jane Austen is not going away. Not in a wildfire, not in a format shift, not in politics and not in DRM.

    And maybe that's fine? Do we really want every last bit of somewhat decent music to show up in our searches forever? Every last meme GIF? What about those LLM-generated "novels" on self-publishing platforms? Maybe your answer is yes, but then tell me, how am I going to sift through it?

    Point is - life beats death through copying of the good stuff, and we're really already doing the same thing. The article is really only discussing about how much of it we should do.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      "Point is - life beats death through copying of the good stuff"

      I listen to various (UK based) eighties stations and I swear you'd think we only had a hundred or so songs for the entire decade.

      In reality there were ridiculously more, but you won't hear anybody playing "Crown of Thorns" by Erasure because the great sorting algorithm of time has judged that as "forgotten". Instead we'll get "Don't Stop Believin'" yet again.

      The interested aversion to this is that rarely do you hear a certain song by Rick Astley, perhaps because it became infamous all by itself?

      1. f4ff5e1881
        Coffee/keyboard

        And I’ll tell you something else for nothing, if I hear ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexy's Midnight Runners one more time, I shall shove my digital radio where there's no reception whatsoever.

        1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Come On, Eileen

          That is one damn annoying song. Have an upvote.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        > I listen to various (UK based) eighties stations and I swear you'd think we only had a hundred or so songs for the entire decade.

        A variation on that theme is re-made films. Once a film gets remade, especially if the original was B&W or cropped for "old telly" and not easily adaptable to widescreen, then the original is never shown again. The more erudite the original and the more dumbed-down the re-make only adds to the effect.

        <grumpy old man rant over>

        1. The Organ Grinder's Monkey

          Whilst you are demonstrably correct, in the UK at least, & possibly elsewhere via their website, the TV channel "Talking Pictures TV" is having a reasonable go at disproving your assertion.

          (The Edgar Wallace Mysteries, Interpol Calling, Space Patrol, Scotland Yard, Maigret (the Rupert Davies ones from the early 60s...)

      3. PB90210 Silver badge

        When they first started opening up the airwaves to the likes of Heart, one of the guys I was working with at the time phoned up one of these new stations to complain that you could tell the time by what they were playing

        They sheepishly had to admit this was true and they were trying to get an expanded playlist

    2. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Trouble is that we aren't anymore

      The "good stuff" is now stored by a small number of very large corporations, who take active measures to ensure nobody copies them at all.

      Until about a decade ago a great film would have a myriad of physical copies, distributed around the world. While many of those copies would decay or be destroyed, the film would survive by dint of numbers.

      The only reason any early Doctor Who episodes still exist is because of the copies physically sent around the world. The BBC actively erased the tapes because they didn't have funding to archive them - at the time it wasn't considered culturally important.

      Now, a great film is only accessible by streaming. While hundreds of millions of people see and enjoy it, none of them have a copy.

      When Netflix et al lose the rights to distribute something, they are required to erase their copy.

      So now, something that's incredibly popular and culturally important may be lost entirely within five years, because nobody was allowed to keep a copy.

      1. f4ff5e1881
        Big Brother

        Re: Trouble is that we aren't anymore

        I think you’ll find that, for now, most films and TV series find their way onto DVD and/or Blu-ray.

        But you’re right, I’m sure that’s not going to carry on indefinitely. I’m very interested in the new Harry Potter TV series, which begins filming later this year, and apparently will span a 10 year production schedule. I’ve no intention of paying for the relevant streaming service to watch it – I fully intend to buy each series as it is released on DVD or Blu-ray.

        Will this still be a viable option, five, ten years down the line? I’m not so sure, but I hope so. I don’t want to get a couple of seasons in, and then be left dangling in mid-air. Wingardium leviosa, and all that.

        1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
          Alert

          DVDs and Blu-ray Longevity

          I'm starting to have some commercially-made DVDs with programming I've paid for, which I bought in the 1990s and early 2000s, gone unreadable despite careful storage and handling. I don't do Blu-rays, so I've no experience with those.

          (Icon for, "Warning: Media Failure Imminent!")

        2. Fred Daggy Silver badge
          Unhappy

          Re: Trouble is that we aren't anymore

          Except, that certain Mus-based Megacorps have a foot in both doors.

          For the corporations, Bluray and other physical media are good. But streaming month after month is so much better. It's not just the ongoing revenue, its the lovely telemetry and co-marketing that this also gleans. "House at Totter's Lane, Shoreditch, just streamed 'Frozen' 2000 times over the period of 6 weeks. Must be a female toddler, potentially two, and one or more stressed parents. Advertise Wine and tranquillisers during the ad breaks"

          Physical media will go the way of the dodo. Just doesn't make *enough* money. There isn't a way that you can buy it at any price.

          No, they will simply NOT get my to to start streaming my Bluray collection that now happily sit on my phone and Kodi server. For the price of one month streaming, i can watch that bluray forever, often with multiple seasons. Don't need to pay top price when it just comes out, wait a couple of months. All legit paid for, no "yo ho ho".

      2. mirachu Bronze badge
        Trollface

        Re: Trouble is that we aren't anymore

        > "Now, a great film is only accessible by streaming. While hundreds of millions of people see and enjoy it, none of them have a copy."

        Piracy FTW!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sun *doesn't* go nova. It will go through an expansion phase which is not the same thing. Novas are short.

  11. f4ff5e1881
    Alien

    The Arc Hive

    This got me thinking a bit. I’m alive now, but in 50 years’ time I’ll be dead as Dillinger.

    Quite a lot of time passes, and eventually the Earth is engulfed by the sun. More time passes, and the universe eventually contracts into nothingness. There is another big bang, another universe is born, lives, and dies, and the process repeats, like a yo-yo going up and down, an almost infinite number of times, before...

    ... pan-dimensional beings from the planet Beebleford build a transdimensional scoopmeister, which they call 'The Arc Hive'. Of all the vastness of time, space, and the infinite multiverses, the hulking machine scoops up... the little program I wrote in Risc OS Basic to play Acorn Archimedes soundtracker files. The mega-brains of Beebleford are slightly disappointed that that’s all they got, nevertheless they quite like the tinkly rendition of Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’.

    My legacy.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Isn't a lot of the problem that so much data is now produced, and the vast majority of it is epemeral shit? In the past, paper imposed physical limitations on how much could be produced, but now it's limitless.

    It's something we have been looking at at work. From the paper era, there were shelves full of archive boxes of stuff which someone had thought worth preserving. A group was set up to go through this, a large proportion was shredded, and the rest properly sorted, catalogued and archived.

    We are now faced with the digital equivalent of over a decade. One of the main fileshares has over a million files, and that's not even the only share. How do you realistically sort and index that, especially given how badly some of it has been named and filed? Not found any answer yet!

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Index new stuff so the situation isn't perpetuated. Any time anyone has to hunt through the old stuff for something, index that something once found. Gradually the bits that matter get indexed.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Sure, that's part of a solution, but there is the cost of keeping vast amounts of redundant shit in case somebody ever wants to look at it. And even if they do, many will give up before finding what they were looking for as they don't have time to wade through all the crap!

    2. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      There's an environmental cost too. Given that most of society's digital creations aren't stored on inert devices but instead in data centres, those storage media stay switched on consuming power, creating pollution.

    3. hammarbtyp

      Worth is in the eye of the beholder

      True, problem is who sets the value. Those family images on your phone? Likely worthless to anyone outside your family, but in 50 years, priceless to your descendent

      History is littered where obscure letters between unknowns now are sold for millions because of history reevaluating their importance

      Problem is everything is now ephemeral, there is a deep irony that as a civilisation we create more content in a month than the rest of the history of civilisation, but in a 100 years historians will have less information on what we thought, how decisions were made, and the day to day life of ordinary people than the time before

  13. AndrueC Silver badge
    Meh

    Meh. It'll all become meaningless or valueless within fifty years anyway. It's nice to think that you and your memories could live on forever but they won't. Your children might be a little bit interested in your life but your grandchildren are unlikely to care.

    Unless you have contributed something important to the sum knowledge of Humanity it's all just irrelevant stuff..and if you have contributed something important then it'll be stored or better yet incorporated into the 'current' dataset of Humanity.

    Either way it won't be your problem. The one advantage of dying is that you won't give a shit.

    1. MarkTriumphant

      I disagree about the grandchildren not caring. I have so many questions for my grandparents, but I can't as they've been dead for between 25 and 50 years.

      The rest seems about right.

    2. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      There is a theory, which I like, that you finally die when your last surviving grandchild dies.

    3. hammarbtyp

      Actually it’s the other way around. Your kids don’t care because they have the chance to interact directly with you, it will be the grandchildren and those who follow who will want to know what you were like, who you were, etc and look for any info to give them a glimpse. After all you will be part of them, and the hope is always by understanding your origins you get an insight into yourself

  14. Long John Silver
    Pirate

    'Paradigm shift' is not a hackneyed expression in this context

    Fortunately, private philanthropic initiatives preserving, and making freely available, huge tracts of digitally expressed culture are doing what politicians lack the imagination to enable, and what private enterprise abhors.

    As an example, I refer to Anna's Archive. This laudable initiative brings together materials hosted by several other, these topic-specific, unofficial collections, which include the admirable Sci-Hub and LibGen. The Archive possesses many terabytes of collated data; its controllers encourage individuals, groups, and institutions (those beyond the reach of US Marine Corp forces) to take and further propagate its (ever-increasing) collection of data. Widely distributed collections protect against natural disaster (e.g. meteor strikes) and happenstance (e.g. what occurred to the ancient Library of Alexandria). At present, the greatest threat comes from 'copyright rentiers' (e.g. publishers) anxious to preserve their outmoded 'rights based' means of business.

    These facilities are expanding into darknets. Some dark networks, e.g. Freenet, offer an alternative means of protection to that provided by full clones of repositories instantiated on individual servers in fixed locations (e.g. Tor) by distributing data across the Internet onto individual participating nodes; any node may contain, unbeknownst perhaps to its operator, portions of the archive, there being multiple overall redundancy. Together, dedicated servers and, the sometimes transient, nodal distribution offer considerable long-term security; perhaps, one day further backup repositories will be hosted by orbiting satellites; eventually this can extend to space vehicles travelling to far places.

    Into this mix is thrown AI. Not only is this fatally disruptive to rentier economics, but also it soon will give everyone access to curated collections of knowledge with the 'intelligence' component acting as, an almost sage, subject-specialist librarian, aggregator, summariser, and teaching aid.

  15. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Websnark

    Eric Burns (AKA Websnark) has a great Tumblr post on this. He's been around the block and seen a thing or two.

    I was there for csserve, for UMNews, for NICBBIS, for LISTSERV. I was there for Netnews, for Usenet, for Gopher, for Online Journalling, for Livejournal, for Myspace. I was there for Moveable Type, for Facebook, for Twitter, for Wordpress, for Medium.

    "But right now? Like, *right now?* Archive the Hell out of your stuff. Memories are golden, but losing actual content sucks on toast."

  16. Blofeld's Cat
    Unhappy

    A new dark age ...

    One of the fears of historians at the moment is that we are entering a new "Dark Age" where it is soon going to be almost impossible to research anything that happened after the middle years of the 20th century, from primary sources.

    A friend was commissioned to write the history of a company that had been founded in Victorian days. The firm still had the minutes of every meeting written down in huge ledgers which lined the walls of their boardroom. Apparently she had so much material that writing the firm's history was very easy, with the hardest part being deciding what to omit.

    These days most firms hold such records electronically and almost certainly delete them after a certain time. Quite often they are legally required to delete records that are no longer needed. To produce a similar history of contemporary firms you would often have to use potentially inaccurate secondary sources.

    Obviously not every record survived when they were held in physical form, but it is a lot easier to casually wipe a hard drive than it is to dispose of a cellar full of filing cabinets and folders.

  17. joetwick

    I work as a dev for a large corporation. We are decomming our system this year. Once the servers on which our code resides are delinked, it will be slowly overwritten by some other system, or the hard disks will be destroyed by shredders. All that code which dozens of people worked on for 5 years and countless person hours, good devs who sweated over each formula and tested and tested until the users got the result they wanted, will simply disappear into the ether. As this is within a corporation and not exposed to the front end of the internet, it won't be preserved in any wayback machine or archive. The same will happen in the Cloud, just on a larger scale, as data is replicated and overwritten across hundreds of servers. I've worked in IT for 25 years and seen this happen over and over again. I have thought of various ways of trying to preserve our hard work but proprietary, security and regulatory reasons, not to mention cost, always make them impractical. I have now resigned myself to the fact that I work in an industry where the fruits of all our labours are ethemeral. If I want to see the ingenuity of the last industrial revolution I can go the Science Museum and look at the machines that are left over. If there are any people left in 100 years and they want to see the code that drove the technological revolution, 99% of it will have vanished into thin air.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      I disagree. You can go to museums and see a small collection of machines. Those will either be the most important ones, thus the ones that were mass-produced and were easily found when they were building the collection, or a few notable ones they went to some expense to obtain. It won't show you lots of machines that were custom-built for one factory and eventually scrapped. Those machines were destroyed before anyone put them in a museum, and the engineer's diagrams were probably stored in paper archives until someone burned them to make more space.

      A hundred years from now, your proprietary software may well have been permanently deleted, but a lot of software from the age will still be around. This is especially true for all the open source software that was foundational. If you want the Apache HTTP server, a version in 1996 that was neither the first nor anything people use today, you can still have it. The same is true for all sorts of other tools. Like the museum, things that weren't used in lots of places and weren't preserved by their creators will have disappeared. Unlike the museum, you could go through the archives and get volumes of information, not just the code, but discussions, bug reports, the lot, for a lot of very important things.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Will disappear into the ether, like tears in rain.

      Time to die.

  18. Softsuits

    About those comments.......

    How many times have you forgotten a method or what a tool is called and looked through the comments to find the answer? Thinking on that; led me to the time immemorial (RFC) Request For Comment. Talk about discovering black gold...Texas Tea. Barney type people attempting to describe esoteric ideas in understandable words to change protocols. I was like a monkee dancing around Black Monolith. Never forget the answers you recieved on the Orderwire when all other things you tried failed. Comments. Where the nitty gritty descriptions and suggestions reside. Lovely Day

    1. Not Yb Bronze badge

      Re: About those comments.......

      Please enjoy: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

      IP over Avian Carriers.

  19. Ochib

    Can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.

  20. StuartMcL

    Ook! ( tr. "It can all be found in the Library of Unseen University")

  21. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

    Paper

    Good paper survives reasonably-well vs most things but fire; you mitigate that by having multiple, dispersed copies.

    Computer Output to Microfiche used to be a thing. So everyone who owns, or has access to, a working fiche reader, please raise their hand (yup, I thought so. Me, neither.)

    The best things about paper are (a) you don't need a tech device to access it, and (b) the "format" of the printed word, these days, changes extremely-slowly vs the format used when the paper record was made.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Paper

      And the worst things about paper when compared to digital storage are that it is really easy to destroy, it is extremely difficult to search, and it is much more costly to copy. If you want something archived, the most important thing is having copies and storing them in preservable ways. In the time it takes me to photocopy one page, I can make a copy of a whole book in digital form and send it to servers on multiple continents.

      1. hammarbtyp

        Re: Paper

        True, but it has one advantage over every other media storage…we have existing proof that data will retain information over 1000s of years and can be retrieved. There is no electronic media method that can say the same

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Paper

      You don't *need* a microfiche reader, it's a convenience.

  22. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge

    It's insane how we delete our digital lives.

    I have adequate (I think) backups of all the photos I need and want to keep for posterity. The same with "important" project files from various endeavors etc etc.

    A friend of mine who was a very good commercial and landscape photographer has about 3 million negatives and transparencies that he can't even give away to archives and the like.

    They don't have the resources to scan or store them so they will end up at the tip one day. A great body of work lost forever.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's insane how we delete our digital lives.

      Your friend would probably have to break up to collection then if they want it to last, as it's probably easier to find a home for different parts of the collection separately.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

    Quote: "...All signal eventually becomes noise...."

    Not really......it depends on the type of preservation which is applied to the signal:

    (1) A catastrophic black hole explosion ten billion (with a "b") years ago is observable (and analysable) today!

    (2) A Microsoft Word document from 1990 cannot be rendered accurately today!

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

      "A Microsoft Word document from 1990 cannot be rendered accurately today!"

      You can:

      1. Run a virtual machine of Windows 3.1 with a version of Office from the time, both of which are easily obtained and run for free on commodity hardware today.

      2. Run a virtual machine of Windows 98 with a later version of Office which still has backward compatibility with that version and the ability to save that version as something later which can be opened by modern software.

      3. Extract the information from the document using open source software today, though you may have to do slightly more to restore something if you used an unusual function.

      Let me guess, you meant that modern software doesn't open that format natively, and that was your complaint? I disagree that there is any problem with that, but it is also not what you said.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

        @doublelayer

        The Magna Carta is a core document in both UK and American law. It was written 800 years ago. There are (I think) eight extant copies. All readable!!

        Now suppose a Microsoft Word document from 1990 has a similar cultural importance.

        Do you really think that 800 years in the future, anyone at all will be able to perform any of your three un-natural acts?

        P.S. In 1990 I was using Micrographx Designer for graphics. Perhaps you can tell me how to render Micrographx Designer images today. Another three un-natural acts perhaps?

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

          If you haven't bothered to save your 1990 ultra-historical document any other times, then maybe it's not so ultra-historical. True, you can find eight original copies of the Magna Carta out there, but I can also find millions of newer copies which are identical because it was important enough to preserve. That also means that, if some disaster had destroyed those eight originals at some point, we'd still know what the Magna Carta said. You probably can't find any of the original copies of the Zimmermann Telegram either because the German copy was probably destroyed and the British-intercepted version was a temporary document sent for decoding, but it was historical, so we made a copy and stored that.

          My three "un-natural acts", which would get you the content of the file for copying and preservation, are not hard to do now and will continue to be achievable with little technical knowledge. I'm not sure what makes them so unnatural since they basically boil down to reading the file and seeing what it says, either using the original software or something that reads its files. They won't make it simple to recover any document 800 years hence for the same reason that I can't get you many other documents from the 1200s today: if the file is gone, it won't help, if the file can't be located because it wasn't labeled, it won't help, and if you can't be bothered to preserve something, it won't help. If you are aware of any important documents that are in 1990 Word format, and you think they are worth preserving, then you can perform these acts and preserve them. I'm willing to volunteer to do that for anything sufficiently important, just let me know. The data that nobody chooses to do that with is probably going to get lost, just as the paper that was burned because making a copy and moving it wasn't considered important.

          As for Micrographx Designer, here you go. If you didn't bother to save your data when you stopped using the program, even if you're regretting it now, it probably means that it wasn't as important as you think. If it was, you would have done more to keep it. Of course, we've all had the experience of losing something we wish we hadn't, and we respond to that by putting more effort into retaining access to it. A file that is very old is not hard to preserve, just as a piece of paper from a long time ago isn't hard to preserve. That some old paper is around does not demonstrate that it is any better at it, and I am confident that, if there are humans in 2800, they'll have lots of files created during our lifetimes available for perusal. It just won't be very many with my name on them, because most of the files I make are not historically relevant.

        2. Ian Johnston Silver badge

          Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

          Now suppose a Microsoft Word document from 1990 has a similar cultural importance.

          Do you really think that 800 years in the future, anyone at all will be able to perform any of your three un-natural acts?

          If it's that important then yes, of course. What proportion of documents from 800 years ago do you think have survived, and why those?

          Stuff that really matters today will make it through. Dozens of boxes of ephemeral journalism won't. That's life. Or perhaps death.

      2. hammarbtyp

        Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

        The only problem with this solution is that it is built on an incredible scaffold of technology which is only one prop removal from coming tumbling down. All those methods require a huge industrial complex to build and maintain, and there is no guarantee how long it can be maintained.

        If it does come tumbling down there is no backup solution

        Fortunately we live in a time where we have sober politicians in charge who are making good long term decisions….

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

          "The only problem with this solution is that it is built on an incredible scaffold of technology which is only one prop removal from coming tumbling down."

          How would those things come tumbling down? The software that runs the virtual machine can be open source. The software you're running in the virtual machine isn't, but thousands of copies are available, specifically from people intending to archive them. The open source document conversion tools have many copies on there, and they may even be in the GitHub Arctic archive. Let's say that I am a supervillain and I want to deliberately prevent you from opening a 1990 Microsoft Word file that you didn't bother to save as something else. How would I be able to do that, when all those tools are available for you?

          But let's consider age. Maybe we can run Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine now, but maybe in 2050, we won't be able to. I'm not sure why because our ability to emulate old systems has increased rather than decreased with time. Enthusiasts have written lots of emulators and archived plenty of software. In the case of Windows, it's emulating a standard X86 processor and the software to do so has already been written. The processor architecture still exists, meaning that anyone wanting to emulate it, whether to run Windows 3.1 or something else, will maintain it. This isn't true of every piece of software. Something niche which only a few people ever used, has a proprietary format that nobody reverse-engineered, and an activation mechanism which has not been circumvented, could indeed produce a file that is prohibitively difficult to preserve in a usable form. This is why I recommend that people consider the formats used by software if they need the files they create to be available long-term and export them to something standard. Microsoft Word is a bad example of this.

  24. Bamba_RFW

    The Domesday book is safe

    It was copied onto 12" Philips laser discs for posterity ....

    https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=1661

    1. PB90210 Silver badge

      Re: The Domesday book is safe

      That was a new version created, in a kind of Wikipedia-style, to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the original document.

      Unfortunately it was released to schools in a non-standard Laserdisc format that was only readable on a non-standard player driven by a BBC Micro.

      Years later a guy sent ages extracting the mixture of analogue and digital data from a disc and build a website to display it. Unfortunately he died, the website expired and his work was lost again.

      Another project has sprung up

      https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=2140

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The irony of the fires is...

    The irony is that since my childhood the scare story has always been the overdue, next big quake that was going to destroy LA, SF et al. Instead it is fire.

    (A friend in his 80s has been affected: he went out for a meal with friends and when they got back he wasn't allowed access to his neighbourhood. When he did get back to his house it was 2 days later and found he has literally nothing left: the chimney breast is still standing and he has the clothes he was wearing and his wallet. Fortunately he has good friends who've offered him a place to stay until he can get sorted.)

  26. UncleDavid

    I'm good. Everything I care about is backed up on half-inch magnetic tape.

    1. munnoch Silver badge

      I really must get around to copying my 5 1/4" floppies onto something more recent. And the 3.5's and the 3's and the microdrives...

  27. nautica Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    From the very end...

    ..."Those plastic tubs now serve another purpose: a reminder that I need to find better digital archives ... and a photocopier."

    A fast scanning system would be a good addition to the mix.

  28. MarthaFarqhar

    With old versions of Word, is there a chance that Clippy may yet be unleashed on the world again?

  29. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

    Take the long view.

    In two million years, none of this will matter.

    ARTHUR: And in two million years: bang! It gets destroyed by the Vogons. What a life for a young planet to look forward to!

    FORD: Well - better than some. I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of Intergalactic Bar Billards. Got potted straight into a black hole, killed ten-billion people.

    ARTHUR: Hmm. Total madness.

    FORD: Yeah! Only scored thirty points too.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yeah, but maybe

    I don’t expect my legacy to last any longer than the end of the memorial service, should there be one.

    Meh.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Yeah, but maybe

      Same here. I worked for over 30 years at a facility in the University I graduated from and then it was closed. While some of that has been saved to be reused another day it has made me wonder why I bothered to be so diligent and to care at the time. No kids, no real partner, so I can even expect much of a memorial even if one is ultimately arranged for me.

  31. steelpillow Silver badge

    The long view

    In Classical times, the great reference library at Alexandria burned, Plato's Academy was sacked and destroyed. Further east the great library at Nalanda was burned, along with the monastery which was its home. Further still, Chinese Confucianists went on a destructive rampage of all things Taoist. And on and on.

    I don't know if he was the first, but in one of his Foundation novels Isaac Asimov observed that information evaporates. Words are forgotten, books moulder, archives are destroyed, whole planets wiped clean. The only way to preserve information over the long term is to copy it faster than it evaporates.

  32. nautica Silver badge
    Meh

    Some people know how to solve a problem. Some don't.

    It has been said that among some--possibly very many--tribes / nations of Indigenous American (amerindian) peoples that they solved the problem of information entropy in an elegant, very simple, fashion.

    If there was information (or a story) whose preservation was absolutely crucial, then one person would tell another (with the strict admonition that the recipient(s) MUST tell two others)--each person being told must, in turn, tell two others, and each of those must tell two others, and...

    The beauty of the scheme, of course, is the same as that of the tale of the payment asked of the emperor by the lowly peasant who invented the game of chess--the number of people who hear the story is exponentially (2N) related to the number of times it is re-told.

    (That the peasant was ultimately killed by the emperor is not relevant).

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