More On Data Extinction
from the so-many-questions dept
There have been a bunch of articles in the past few months discussing the concept of “data extinction”. I’m guessing that we’ve reached the point where we’ve gone through enough formats and systems that more and more people are “suddenly” realizing that a lot of old data on old machines is unreadable. While this article doesn’t discuss solutions as much as past articles, it is still an interesting look at how people assume that digital data will last throughout the ages, simply because you can make a perfect copy. The problem, of course, is that the applications to read that data go away. As more and more of our lives go digital, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
Comments on “More On Data Extinction”
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This is the main reason why the paperless office is such a fantasy. We can read documents that were created 2000 years ago and preserved on parchment. Good luck reading a word processing document you created in 1990 (unless you saved a printout!)
my-article-seems-to-have-dissapeared-from-your-ind
You heard it here first . Unfortunately, the link seems to have decayed within the search index.
more reasons for open standards
This article and many others point out the need for the support of open standards that have not changed that much since the start of the computer revlution. If data is in a widly used formant then reading it in the future will not be that much of a problem. You might have to change the storage media.