In February 2009 I wrote a post entitled “Preserving the record” in which I queried the reliability of digital media for long-term storage. The following is a comment from one of my readers at the time, followed by my reply:
digital storage
All posts tagged digital storage
Recent discussions about the decline in handwriting have highlighted a disturbing thought, namely, can digital equipment and media provide a reliable means of long-term storage for our written records, photographs and music? If my experiences have been anything to go by then the answer is no.
My first computers were Amstrad PCWs which stored everything on removable floppy discs. Just to be awkward, these were not the same discs as used in “IBM-compatible PCs” so that when I upgraded eventually to a Dell PC it was necessary to use a special cable and software to transfer all my text discs from PCW to Dell, and then import them into Microsoft Word. Those were the days when “state of the art” so far as the general public were concerned amounted to 100mb hard drives, Windows 3.1 and the WWW was for a small minority of “anoraks”.
Now, apparently, PC floppies are obsolete though I have still a couple of dozen unused. Anticipating this, I put all my back-up storage on to CDs. Then the trouble began. Despite careful storage some CDs later proved unreadable (even in the machine on which they had been recorded). Later CD drives failed to read CDs made on earlier drives and so on. Add to this major computer/hard drive breakdowns (three in 20 years) – precisely the reasons for making back-up discs in the first place – and, one way or another I lost hundreds of digital photos a few years ago and still more files in 2006.
Fortunately, most of the really important photos and text files pre-dated the advent of home computers and are safe still in their original paper form. Now, I use a one-year-old laptop and have everything important backed up on CDs and on a less than one-year-old USB hard drive. I am reasonably confident that I will not suffer major losses of computer content during the next few years but that is not the point.
The point is that I have family photos and other documents (for example) dating back into the 19th Century mostly in their original form. They, at least, could well last for another couple of centuries or more. However, in view of the ever more widespread use of digital equipment and storage media, how can today’s text documents, photos (and music files) be stored securely for the benefit of the next four or five (or more) generations? Or are we expected to become a society which is happy to discard anything that is more than a year or two old, including all traces of our own day to day history?
Just Williams 
“I have been a reluctant computer user of one sort or another since about 1979, but always made to feel an ignorant technophobe.(despite publicising them, writing copy and articles about them – even being employed by Microsoft to write erudite garbage for them).
“It is still the case on a daily basis and I have only just realised why.
“Computers,and other digital stuff, obviously are good/useful etc.
“The whole problem is they are being utterly misused in just about every way imaginable.
“One of the principal reasons is that the software industry has always been dominated by very young, mostly spotty faced inadequates who have traditionally produced all the stuff that makes computers work.
“Unfortunately, hardly anyone other than the programmers understood what the software was and how it worked because every detail of it was originated in the minds of these juvenile delinquents whose immaturity and lack of understanding of the wider World left them without a clue as to how to use things like ‘graphic design’ principles and just plain ‘common sense’ to make things readable and understandable etc.
“Also, it takes my breath away to still see software on a daily basis that I am expected to use, but which usually has either no explanation, very little or is totally incomprehensible due to the inarticulate incapacity of the originators to be able use even the most rudimentary communication skills to explain anything about it to anyone else.
“I went through a period of about 15 years of sharing my London house with three or four young lodgers at a time, many of whom were these very programmers.
“I saw at first hand how incredibly dim and silly they were and how they inevitably inflicted their endlessly juvenile thinking on others through their infantile software production.
“It is still the case that the whole computing World is dominated by people like this and riddled with infantile stupidity. It’s that simple.
“That is the problem.
“We all have to use computing by using the childish and infantile rubbish that immature people thrust down our unwilling throats.”
“Wow! And I thought that I could turn on the heat when peeved about something! Now I can see that I am but an amateur. On the other hand I am sure that you have a point, though it would be too much of a generalisation to apply your remarks to ALL software designers and the companies that employ them. I feel a new post coming on!”
Recently I discovered that my desktop hard drive, bought a few years ago to be an independent method of long-term storage for files and pictures, cannot be accessed by my new Windows 10 laptop. So far, no-one has been able to explain why except to make vague references to “disc formats” – which is not really good enough is it?