Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

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."

Quick...

[eegad]

Everybody print out all their emails!!!

One Site to Archive Them All

[enoz]

http://archive.org/ [archive.org]

They've already got a copy of your Geocities sites from the first Digital Dark Age.

Re:Quick...

[biryokumaru]

Oh god, why doesn't Gmail have a print all function!?

Not so hard

[T Murphy]

Just put a massive data server in a spaceship and accelerate it near the speed of light. Data loss would be slowed enough that it would be negligible, and if we have to retrieve anything it should have a fast enough processor to respond to a request in a timely fashion and send off a pre-made copy of the needed data (as it may take too long to copy petabytes at near light speed).

This should work out perfectly- by the time we have the technology to do this, today's worthwhile material should finally be coming out of copyright.

Re: One Site to Archive Them All

[indeciso]

...One Site to find them, One Site to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them...

Re:Won't matter

[JustOK]

They wouldn't be able to use that stuff because of copyrights and DRM

Gmail Paper

[illiteratewithdrawal]

Google does one better: Gmail Paper [google.com]

Re:The Middle Ages didn't have the DMCA

[agrif]

I'm not sure where I heard this idea, but it bears repeating:

Future historians will hate us, with a passion, because we encrypt even the most banal things. We encrypt movies, for God's sake! Where's the justification in that? We're robbing the future of our culture, even from things like movies with talking hamsters!