[Leica] Durability of digital files.

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Bob Adler writes:

I wonder where our digital files will be in 25 years. My guess is that very
few of us will be able to find and review them, much less have our family
members casually browse through them after we're gone.


- - - - -


Bob,

By coincidence, my oldest daughter spent the weekend with us. She is a
curator for the National Archives and we discussed that exact subject. The
mission of the National Archives is twofold: 1) to preserve historical
documents in perpetuity, and 2) to make the documents accessible to the
pubic. The first objective could probably be achieved by placing the
documents in a deep freeze (or liquid nitrogen) but that would conflict with
the second requirement. The admittedly imperfect solution they arrived at
for paper documents is to cycle the documents, putting them on public view
one year out of ten and keeping them on cold storage the rest of the time,
all except for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Those
are kept in high tech blast proof, controlled environment cases costing a
couple of million dollars each.


All this is OK for historical papers, including an original copy of the
Magna Carta. The big problem is with digital records, data tapes, e-mail
files, contemporary digital photos, etc. The Archives maintains one or more
of each type of digital reading equipment developed since the Jurassic. Card
punches and readers, 8 and 16 track tape drives, floppy disc drives from 8"
to 2", CD and DVD writers of all descriptions. A constant task is refreshing
files by placing them on more durable media. Right now the archival media of
choice is premium gold plated CD platters with a reputed 100 year life span.
This is much longer than the dye based DVDs or run of the mill CDs that most
of us use to store data. The experts feel that CD and DVD drives will be
available for the next few decades. After that, who knows?

Larry Z