Data Preservation Instinct

If you would sit down to write something meaningful, personal and long lasting, not real memoirs, but something you would definitely want to review some time later, where would you write it. From one side you would definitely want it to be organized, structured and searchable, in other words digital, but on the other hand you would not want it to be on that hard drive that just failed or that nice site that closed recently or that network storage provider who went under and took all your precious data with you.

And what editor would you launch? I use a Mac now, so I have launched the Omni Outliner Pro, the only software I have bought out of sense of gratitude to its creators. However, I will only use it for editing the immediate stuff and initial organizing. I will not be able to store my materials here indefinitely, because it is not portable enough, so I can not use it if I move to another operating system like Linux or Windows. I can not count on it for sustaining over several (or many) years. I will not provide enough organization for large amounts of materials etc. etc.

The same is true for almost any other commercial editor, Word or whatever. Their file formats are very problematic, usually combining both form and content together and having a few years life span. Yes you would be able to open older ones (in most cases) but you will usually have to upgrade and convert your older files, especially if you have used some formatting. And if, god forbid, you would want to change to another environment then you will have real problems on your hands.

You would really want it to be there when you need it in three or five years. Editable, with the structure, the keywords and the formatting. But achieving this, seemingly obvious, goal with current technology is very difficult and required vast technological expertise. You can not really count on anything, these days, not even file dates can be reliably preserved over time. Not to mention any other metadata. Say you invested the time to add some comments to a file in Spotlight, copy it to another machine via a FAT partitioned drive, they are gone, this is just an example.

Even though, it costs absolutely nothing to copy digital data, the fact that saddens some content publishers, the volatility of such data is so high that preserving it usually costs much more in the long run, especially if you really care about it. This is another in the long list of reasons, why most of the existing models of digital data consumption are obsolete. You could have a few thousand dollars worth of music on your iPod only to loose it in a second to a toilet bowl. But wait, the music is still available there on iTiunes and you already paid for it once, so why can't you get it back. At least with software you pay for the license and then can always get the software itself even if the original disks got damaged. What did you really buy when you paid for those thousands of songs?

Fast forward to a perfect world of tomorrow, an international standard for a database backed file system with secure and transparent distributed backup and universal encoding is available and all the problems described above are history. What would it take to get there short of a miracle.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend, about the state of user data backup today. In fact the only OS coming with any decent usable tool for this purpose is the latest OS X, Leopard which has a reasonably easy to use utility called Time Machine. My friend told me that most of the users did not need any such backup, since they did not actually produce any substantial materials on a regular basis, at least not till the development of the personal digital photography. So till fairly recently, there was not real need for sophisticated backup and data structuring systems, at least not at the demand level that would justify the creation of one. Even today, when hard drives are very cheap, I keep seeing people loosing their entire collections of irreplaceable family photos in a second.

Well, I think that now, as our creativity in the digital world rises and more people produce their own digital artifacts we must think of keeping our creations in the digital world at least as safe as they would be in the real one, and even safer.