Dangers of Digital Technology

[standard8]

read this interesting article the other day which brings home the problems of using modern electronic formats for archival purposes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

basically back in 1986 to celebrate 1000 years of the doomsday book the BBC decided to do a "modern" version. unfortunately now twenty odd years later technology has moved on somewhat and the discs became unreadable and a whole new project had to be started up to retrieve the information from the original project! ironically the original 1000 year old doomsday book was more accessable than the modern version! if only they had used old fashioned "micro-fiche" or something similar.

at least with film as long as the original it kept in good condition whatever the technology of the future is at least it will be fairly easy to get an image from it.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

Well no surprise that is what you get if you record it in a format that needs special hardware to play it. I mean come on... to play it a custom-built hardware "Doomsday Player" was needed... and they expect it to survive?

This is so not comparable with playback of a DVD. A DVD player is a bit easier to find than a Doomsday Player. :roll:

Sure, we can debate all we want about how durable a DVD is, but if it is copied to new media with lets say 10 year intervals (or whenever a DVD player is about to be obsolete, record it to the next standard, lika Blu-ray ir some hologram-disc or whatever).

This is like saying "Oh, the Stasi secret archives cannot be read anymore, because nobody knows how they were encoded... so we cannot view JPG files in ten years because computers won´t know how to decode a JPG file" (yes, that was exactly what a swedish TV program compared when they wanted to scare everyone with doomsday tales).

[standard8]

This is so not comparable with playback of a DVD. A DVD player is a bit easier to find than a Doomsday Player. :roll:

DVD players are easy to find now 'cos we still use them, but in 50 yrs time. can you see the future that well? how many people do you know who still have Betamax video recorders? :roll:

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

DVD players are easy to find now 'cos we still use them, but in 50 yrs time. can you see the future that well?

I guess you didn´t read what I wrote: "(or whenever a DVD player is about to be obsolete, record it to the next standard, lika Blu-ray or some hologram-disc or whatever)."

[standard8]

another interesting article on the subject

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... al-archive

[standard8]

I guess you didn´t read what I wrote: "(or whenever a DVD player is about to be obsolete, record it to the next standard, lika Blu-ray or some hologram-disc or whatever)."

but will your children, grand-children etc etc be bothered to go to the time/expense of doing that every 10-15 years - i hope so.

i've got a heap of Video8 camcorder tapes from the early 90's that i keep looking at and thinking "i need to get them onto DVD" while my old camcorder is still working but there are so many and it seems such a laborious job i never get around to doing it. i'm sure there are a lot of people doing just the same thing.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

but will your children, grand-children etc etc be bothered to go to the time/expense of doing that every 10-15 years - i hope so.

Well if they cannot be bothered to copy a few discs once every 10-15 years... I guess they are not that interested and will not miss whatever is on the DVDs.

[aj]

Speculating on the next transfer product may be lucrative...
Buy numbers of cheap current drives and keep computers and software to read/use them. In the near future thousands and thousands of people will be stuck with unreadable media.

The problem is a bit reading faded magnetic tapes and discs with digital errors. Extra sensitive reading heads should be available.

[etimh]

I read an article a few years back about how somebody--I think it was the Library of Congress, or it might have even been the DOD because the project had some military contracting connection--were anticipating the data technology obsolescence issue and were developing a fail-safe, long-term data storage system.

Well, what they came up with was a titanium or some kind of metallic disc that looked an awful lot like a silver colored vinyl record. It in fact utilized a mechanical process whereby the data information was cut into the surface like an old analog record. Supposed to last for forever and seemed logical to me.

The person who had developed it and who was interviewed for the article noted the irony that, after all the technological sophistication of current digital technologies, to guarantee long-term preservation of material they were returning to the technological equivalent of carved stone tablets. Now that is retro.

Tim

[Ektagraphic]

That is what I fear. My Kodachrome slides arn't going to ever go anywhere. To me, taking a picture digitally is the same as not taking it at all.

[Jim Carlile]

DVD players are easy to find now 'cos we still use them, but in 50 yrs time. can you see the future that well? how many people do you know who still have Betamax video recorders? :roll:

Oh, they'll be around. I mean, look at standard 8... (jk ) !

Right now there are lots of 78 collectors-- I know people who even cut 78 disks for fun, so I suspect there'll be a few eccentrics around then ( of course we're all gonna be poor but that's another matter...!)

[granfer]

Good point, Jim, but there is a world of difference between the MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Sound/Vision formats and the modern ELECTRONIC Audio/Visual formats.
If a FILM projector or a PHONOGRAPH breaks down it is not beyond the whit of practical people to fashion and fit spare parts, often with simple hand tools. But Video recorders, DVD players and Computers etc are totally dependant on both HIGH PRECISION mechanical engineering and on possibly obselesent semiconductor components (integrated circuit chips etc) which are specifically developed for a purpose and for a format. As formats change, these disappear simply because they have no further function, and in this "throwaway" world the hardware is abandoned to the waste skip because 99.999% of users cannot concieve a further use (Have you tried to sell a prerecorded video tape, even VHS, recently?). No spares stock retained, and very little Hardware for cannibalization either. It's a sad world.
If the worst comes to the worst, even with regular 8mm, as long as the film lasts you can still see the pictures with a magnifying glass!

granfer

[Angus]

There are very real issues and problems with the preservation of digital data.

Even within recent time, standards have changed dramatically.

Say you discover some 5.25 inch floppies which have some data you want to view...where are you going to find a drive to read them? Nobody makes or sells them any more. And yet twenty years ago every PC had them as standard, or at least an option alongside the new-fangled 3.5 inch floppy....which itself now is obsolete.

The BBC's Doomsday project was based on laserdiscs, which in 1985 were the highest capacity digital storage medium available. They used 12 inch discs recorded with pits rather like CDs, though data density was much lower. But fast-forward 20 years and laserdisc is totally obsolete.

The chap who, in 1985, took John Logie Baird's 1920's Phonovision video discs and restored the images backed up the computer data he used onto 5.25 floppies. A few years later he backed these up to 3.5 floppies...today I believe he has glass master CDs in several locations just in case......in just 24 years he's had to back up 3 times to 3 successive formats because the earlier formats became unworkable.....but the original analogue discs which contain the video recordings are still playable.

Needle-in-groove, optical images....both provide secure data storage which can be easily retrieved. It takes experts today many hours to retrieve info from obsolete computer systems...where do you find an ESDI or RLL controller?

In 50 years time, people may well look at a DVD or Blu-Ray and say "What the heck is this? This huge disc thing, how did you play those? A box below your TV? Man that's retro. Are there any around now? Museum, you think? Wow."

[standard8]

the moral of the story seems to be

chemical/analogue (film, vinyl) formats for originating and archiving
digital/electronic formats for manipulation and distributing

using both you get the best of both worlds, the flexibility of digital and the long term availability of film, reliance on just one and you could be in trouble.

[71er]

Two things:
Data is often stored in archives. For whatever reason it might be forgot about - so nobody will continue to copy it into a new format. But in 80 years time somebody will find it by accident and then ...? And don't say that this is highly hypothetical because I read on the news every other month about films, etc. that were not be known of but now dicovered in some corner of a museum,...
It is true that some equipment is not produced anymore because its technology is obsolete; but as mentioned before: some electronic equipment can't even be repaired or reproduced anymore because there is no matching electronic parts available nowadays. A good example I heared of: in the 40's radios operated by "valves" (before transistors) were produced. By now the knowledge of how to produce such a valve has been lost - it can not be done anymore without developing the production process from scratch.
Long live the film!