Losing History in the Digital Age

“...digital information lasts forever or five years, whichever comes first.” Jeff Rothenberg, Scientific American, Jan 1995.

Do you leave photos on your digital camera's memory or on your PC's hard drive, and never get round to printing them?

Have you data created using programs and / or file formats that are no longer in current use?

Do you have data on your PC's hard drive that isn't backed up? Or stored on 3.5" floppy disks? Or worse, 5.5" floppies?

If so, you may be unwittingly contributing to the loss of your family's history. It's a consequence of the digital age, where technology changes quickly and today's data formats and hardware are obsolete within a few years.

This doesn't only apply to pictures of your kids' birthday parties. It effects government and company records, and the recordings of historic events.

The issue of obsolete media was addressed by a speaker during a recent conference on Open Source technologies. Working with the National Archives of Australia, he explained in some detail the problems of digitally storing important documents, photographs and recordings created on closed source formats and / or obsolete media. In may cases, data is reformatted into "Open Document Format" files (the format that Microsoft is reluctantly implementing in it's Office software suite), and permanently stored on hard drive arrays.

The government is acting on the problem, but many industries are not. Recently, when asking an overseas manufacturer for information on some faulty equipment, I was informed that the drawings were stored on microfiche and they didn't have a working reader. In the end, they found a reader, but it highlights the problem of not updating data formats so that the information remains accessible.

Future retrieval of information stored on obsolete media will be expensive and may well be impossible if organisations don't implement a program of transferring data to modern, and preferably 'open,' media formats.

As for your family snaps, print them out and store them in a box in a cupboard. Your grand-kids will appreciate seeing their family history in years to come.