You may have just written a world class* e-book or a thesis which outlines how cancer or HIV may be eradicated. No doubt, you will have used an electronic device of some description to record your masterpiece. You will probably assume that your Opus Magnum will live forever electronically and preserve your memory forever. However, electronic storage is intrinsically temporal and so it is up to you to develop preservation strategies. Firstly, let’s look at how you store your electronic documents.
1) On a personal non networked PC or Laptop
You will probably save this to the local hard drive with some primitive back up such as a USB memory stick or hard drive.
2) On a personal networked PC or Laptop
This is a smarter option and nowadays it probably means that you are using some sort of cloud storage service, such as Google Drive, Office 365 or Dropbox. Your assumption is, perhaps correctly, that these guys will look after the backup for you.
3) On a business PC or Laptop
You will probably save your documents on corporate network storage device with back up, or perhaps a cloud storage service, although government departments are loathe to do this. Additionally, your files may be stored as e-mail attachments or part of a corporate document management system.
Over a period of say two to five years, all of the above methods of managing documents are quite effective although I have personal experience of tears shed by those who use the first method exclusively. Now, let’s look at how instability of your electronic files increase as time goes on.
A) Change of Personnel – For 1) and 2), should you become hospitalized, leave an organisation or worse then unless you have made shared passwords with someone then protected documents may not be available to the world. In 3) organisations try to remove this risk by having policies which mandate users to store documents in the so called corporate memory which usually means a corporate document management system. Despite possible censure, many corporate users resist this electronic files held in e-mail systems and personal drives are often lost.
B) Applications – The software that you use to open documents can change over time and render information unavailable. This is probably truer for business applications such as finance systems but many common word processing packages from the 1980s have vanished – think of Wordperfect. Therefore, don’t assume that Microsoft Word will be here forever.
The other main consideration is that people are moving away from formal documents to social media and smart phone apps. Big organisations no longer use exclusively applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to record customer complaints and compliments. Therefore, structured databases are starting to morph into a record mixture held in e-mail,tweets and apps which has led to the emergence of sophisticated data analytics system under the Big Data umbrella.
C) Hardware – This by definition degrades and becomes obsolescent, sometimes without any notice. The users who fall into the category of – 1) On a personal non networked PC or Laptop – are at greatest risk. The primary hard disk usually has a life expectancy of 3 to 5 years whilst most back up devices, including back up tapes, SD and USB drives, may survive for up to ten years, depending on read / write cycles. The exception to this is Mdisc or optical disk technology which purports to have a life expectancy of 1000 years. Obviously, this has not yet been tested.
Category 1 users are very exposed to single points of failure – in other words there is no resilience in the event of failure. It is like an airplane with just one propeller. The users who use network devices will usually avail of solutions which don’t have single points of failure. However, there have many well publicised cases where data has been lost or stolen and the regulatory authorities have slapped great big fines on organisations.
Networked and Cloud solutions will use tape back up and other devices to counter hardware failures. However, considering that hard drives are going to fail eventually, you can see that your files will probably go through many copy routines to prevent loss. This in itself introduces a significant risk in terms of loss and cost. The chances of your files surviving extensive copying for 50 to 100 years is pretty slim.
D) Other factors
Cost
Today, many cloud storage providers offer free or lost cost storage solutions on the basis that you are eventually going to purchase something from them. Think of some recent big name technology providers who are no longer around – Altavista, to name but one.
Politics
There is no such thing as political stability and you will read in the press how certain countries prevent or open up at will access to internet services. Can you imagine how internet would be affected by world war three, if it ever comes. Information is power.
Catastrophes
A lot of data centres have been build historically on flood plains, earthquake zones and near mountains and oceans. Let’s hope that we don’t have any dionosaur experiences.
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What can we do
Firstly, there is no easy answer but I certainly recommend moving away from being a user in the category 1) On a personal non networked PC or Laptop.
It is obvious that you should use back up and storage – maybe using 1 to 2 cloud services such as Dropbox and Google-drive. Be sure that you share all of your documents with close friends and family to ensure they are still around even if you aren’t. Perhaps you should archive some of your most valuable documents to an M-drive and leave it in a safe somewhere.
Lastly, have you ever thought of having your most important documents printed out – maybe even ornately through a printer / bookbinder – and distributing copies to your friends, family or even your local library.
The Technology Whodunnit 