My wife put together a photo album for my birthday this
week. It was a very good idea because we possess a large number of photos, all
digital, and they are all saved on the computer. We got an external hard drive
where some photos go but to be honest, we never had a process for saving all our
data to one location.
I used to save images to CDs and lost some of those already because for some reason my new computer does not read those CDs. I should have checked before getting rid of the old PC. Had I printed them, those images will have been with me today. So I’m very thankful for the huge effort my wife made of choosing images, taking them to a print shop and placing them in an album.
This is a common challenge faced when the information technology is changing rapidly. Storage capacity is now in the Terabytes and we all are producing information on formats that require more and more storage volumes. If we intend to retrieve this information in the future, how do we ensure that it is readable then?
After carved stone, the most durable medium to date is print. Paper has proven to be very good at carrying forward information. It is not practical to transfer all present day data to paper as a matter of record but it is important to set criteria as to what is critical for future reference.
Cloud providers can be a viable option for data storage as they offer ubiquitous access, expanding volume and the capability to update storage formats to that of the day. This goes hand in hand with the fact that data in the Cloud is controlled and secured by the provider and not the data owner so caveat emptor!
Another strategy will be to own a large storage device and put in place a regiment of uploading important documents there. If the technology for retrieving documents change, it would be easier to transform and then transfer those files to the latest medium.
As the British Museum curators are apt to point out, it's much easier to preserve an Egyptian papyrus from 3,000 years ago than to preserve a floppy disk from 30 years ago. - Prof Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University
Posted by: Sean | 2012.10.29 at 15:20