Archiving Digital History at the NARA 202
val1s writes "This article illustrates how difficult archiving is vs. just 'backing up' data. From the 38 million email messages created by the Clinton administration to proprietary data sets created by NASA, the National Archives and Records Administration is expecting to have as much a 347 petabytes to deal with by 2022. Are we destined for a "digital dark age"?"
347 petabytes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't seen any software system that can reliably scale to that level and still make any kind of sense for someone that wants to find a piece of data in that haystack, err. haybarn.
Data loss will always be a possibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Retain it all. (Score:2, Insightful)
Difference between data and trash (Score:5, Insightful)
Dark Ages (Score:5, Insightful)
I think more accurately, we are headed towards an age of super-saturation of information. I have no doubt we can store all the data we are currently and will be generating. The question is how do we process it in to something meaningful? Just because we have the ability to archive everything, does not mean it will be useful to the [insert personally welcomed overlord] of the future.
Maybe historians of the future will be fascinated that Clinton's instant-message signoff was "l8ter d00d", but I doubt it. We'll want to save everything now of course, because we can. But the majority of the information I suspect will just be filtered out when actually searched.
Personally, I take the "you never know" ideology and save everything.
Not a dark age... was the past so bright? (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital technologies mean that archivists now enjoy orders of magnitude more potential accessibility that in the past. Even if paper has greater innate archival lifespan, its physical form makes in inaccessible to all but a select monkish class of archivists colocated with their paper archives. Even the select few archivists who are allowed access to paper archives can only effectively process at best dozen documents per minute (and only a dozen per hour if they must wander the files to find randomly dispersed documents).
By contrast, digital technologies radically expand access on two dimensions. First, technology expands the number of people that can access an archive in terms of distance -- a remote researcher can have full access, including access to documents in use by other archivists. A low cost to copy documents means a wealth of information. Second, search tools provide prodigious access to the files -- searching/accessng/reading thousands or millions of documents per second.
To say we face a dark age is to presume that paper documents provided far more enlightenment and comprehensiveness of documentation than paper ever actually did.
Answer is not compression, it's less data. (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer to archiving the required volumes is producing less volumes. Case in point... we recently spent a week or so at work optimising a process that was I/O bound. The bugger took 10 hours to run. Although purchasing faster disks, converting to RAID0, and other techniques did whittle down the execution time to about 5 hours, the final solution was to redefine the process to reduce the actual IO (removed a COBOL sorting stage in the process), and the process is now 2 hours.
Bottom line: with the 100 + 38 million dollars (FTFA) assigned to the project I am sure I could eliminate a number of redundant positions, optimise some communication channels, retire voluminous individuals, replace inefficient protocols/people, and basically reduce the sources of data. Hell, if the US were to actually have peace instead of demand it, there would be a much reduced need for military inteligence, political rhetoric, and other civil responsibilities. The military could be half the size, and what do you know, we could not only reduce the requirement for archiving, but could actually save money in the process.
Remeber, govenment is a self-supporting process.
Go ahead, mark me a troll.
gus
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Data loss will always be a possibility (Score:4, Insightful)
The key, I think, is prioritization. We all do it individually (important stuff gets backed up many times and often, unimportant stuff perhaps never backed up), and NARA will have to do it too. I don't think backing up a president's email and backing up some minor whitehouse aide's email should have equal importance. The trick will be to come up with a reasonable prioritization scheme that will make the probability of losing the most important stuff very small.
Slightly overdramatic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Every mail is sacred (Score:3, Insightful)
If a mail is wasted
The gods get quite irrate
Every mail is wanted
Every mail is good
Every mail is needed
In your network neighborhood
Really, the idea of not being able to record and save every post-it note being equated with those times and places where writing itself was denigrated into virtual nonexistence is a bit silly.
KFG
Re:Why do we need to archive everything? (Score:4, Insightful)
the more I think about it... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd much rather see those hundreds of millions of dollars invested in, for instance, making all out of print recordings and books available on-line. It's a smaller problem (sounds like), but would benefit the world much more than online copies of every government employee's timecard records.
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Re:Difference between data and trash (Score:1, Insightful)
Things that previous generations considered unworthy of preservation are things that are greatly treasured in today's age - look at all the old manuscripts of which we only have a few pages (because scribes reused the parchment). Look at the masterpieces that were painted over to save canvas.
As soon as you start to put hard limits down on what to preserve, and what to leave alone, we risk losing information that our next generations will value.
Besides - in many cases, it could just be easier to save everything. It seems that trying to enforce standards and judging what should and shouldn't be preserved might be more labour-intensive than the alternative. Considering the rate at which informationis generated it might make sense to have a trade-off between conserving storage versus conserving labour... storage is easier/cheaper/more available
Re:Answer is not compression, it's less data. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's only a 60% reduction. A 60% reduction of 347 PB is still 138.8 PB...still a huge archival task.
Keep 1% of the data still leaves you with 3.47 PB. Not impossible, but still a daunting task.
Re:burn, knowledge, burn (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely, yes!
History is often taught as "Charlamagne took over Constantinople in the year 12xx" as though military feats really mattered to the average Joe. But, the truth is, America was colonized by people who thought that, however bad it might be in a virgin land, it was BETTER than their lives in Europe.
One of the key failures in public education today is to communicate the understanding that history is comprised mostly of PEOPLE doing ORDINARY things in their time to make life better for themselves and their families. They loved, worked, got bored, and cracked jokes at the expense of their leaders, just like we do today.
History doesn't consist of battles, anymore than history consists of artworks. Capturing more detail in the average, everyday lives of people gives a much better understanding to the cultural norms, and the ideals to which people aspired.
The pyramids of ancient Egypt provide a clear, artistic monument to their culture, yet we have an only modest understanding of their day to day cultures. Similarly, we have Stonehenge as a clear monument to the grooved-ware people of the English isles, but almost NO understanding of who they were and what they felt was important. How much would a true historian give to understand the day-to-day culture of these mysterious "grooved-ware" people of ancient?
Those memos and IMs comprise that understand of people today.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Try to help correct other's math sans sarcasm. (Score:5, Insightful)
To you and the countless others on /. who offer their corrections in a similar tone: Yes, we get it, the parent poster goofed and you supplied a correction. Given the trivial context here, it's hardly a big deal and doesn't warrant sarcasm. Everyone make mistakes and plenty of people make mistakes in their work every day, including people who do work where lives are at stake. That's one reason why it is good to work with other people. In life it's far more important to be forgiving, keep things in perspective, and help other people without the wiseacre commentary and then move on.