Even Digital Memories Can Fade
By KATIE HAFNER
Original
Article on NYtimes.com
The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures
- millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American
novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the
next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the
problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the
experts.
"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take
a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management
Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional
photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work."
Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of
the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that
the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming
committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for
digital preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library of
Congress, said the library, faced with "a deluge of digital
information," had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project,
with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digital
material so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardware or
software being used. The assumption is that machines and
software formats in use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.
"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations
all the way down to individuals," said Ken Thibodeau,
director for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives
and Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and
den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of
Zip disks and 3½-inch diskettes, even the larger 5¼-inch floppy
disks from the 1980's. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that
people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD's
and other backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD's and
hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with
a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed
to extremes in humidity or temperature.
And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become unusable. Unlike, say,
faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital
file becomes corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.
"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and
moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey
Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.
Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate materials
in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials
trapped in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So
they are forced to devise their own stopgap measures, most of them unwieldy,
inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.
Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco,
is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he
was in elementary school, Mr. Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school
work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in
e-mail since college. Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens
of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.
Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually
transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like
CD's and DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm sentimental
about," he said.
Yet Mr. Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CD's, especially the rewritable
variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a year and a half ago
they started to deteriorate, and become unreadable," he said.
And of course, migration works only if the data can be found, and with ever
more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.
"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed
but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to
find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those
photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"
For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the bin under
the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach to archiving,
means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.
Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example, keeps his old PC
in the back of a closet underneath a box. The machine contains everything in
his life from the day he married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer
in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Mr. Yates said,
it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure
my entire office just to get it to boot up," he said.
Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializes in
long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now,
the museum approach might be the most feasible answer.
"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable you'll be able to
go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient
computer available," said Mr. Schwartz, whose company has worked with the
Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.
"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," he said. "There's
going to be a whole industry of people who will have shops of old
machines, like the original Mac Plus."
Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is the printout
method.
Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles,
has been using computers since elementary school. She
creates her own Web sites and she spends much of her day online.
Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set at her parents' house
100 miles away.
"As much as a lot of people think print will be dead because of computers,"
she said, "I actually think there's something about the
tangibility of paper that feels more comforting."
Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes to preserving
photographs. If stored properly, conventional color
photographs printed from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading.
Newer photographic papers can last up to 200 years.
There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a hard drive.
Today's formats are likely to become obsolete and future software "probably
will not recognize some aspects of that format," Mr.
Thibodeau said. "It may still be a picture, but there might be things in
it where, for instance, the colors are different."
The experts at the National Archives, like those at the Library of Congress,
are working to develop uniformity among digital computer
files to eliminate dependence on specific hardware or software.
One format that has uniformity, Mr. Thibodeau pointed out, is the Web, where
it often makes no difference which browser is being used.
Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular archiving method, especially
when it comes to photos.
Shutterfly.com and Ofoto .com have hundreds of millions of photographs on their
computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup set of each photo sent to the site.
The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the fault line,"
said David Bagshaw, chief executive of Shutterfly.
But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out of business?
Mr. Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side, but offered this bit
of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'll
always make people's images available to them."
Constant mobility can be another issue.
Stephen Quinn, who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.,
moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to keep
the amount of paper in his life to a minimum, and rarely makes printouts.
Dr. Quinn keeps a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an eclectic
set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980's, when he started out on
an Amstrad computer.
All of Dr. Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable" he says)
and other writings are on those various digital devices, along with his
daily diaries.
At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for his children,
but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad
disks more than 20 years ago.
He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer.
"I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read it with,"
Dr. Quinn said.
That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever solution people might
use, it is sure to be temporary.
"We will always be playing catch up," said Dr. Rutenbeck, who is working
at pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives and
stacks of old Zip disks.
"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't keep
a box of everything I did in first grade."