November 10, 2004
Even Digital Memories Can Fade
he nation's115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millionsof photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great Americannovel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materialsfor the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problemof digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is goingto take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media ManagementServices, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditionalphotograph 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 shotsnever leaving a personal computer's hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservationin general that the Library of Congress has spent the last several yearsforming committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparednessfor digital preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology servicesat the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with "a delugeof digital information," had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollarproject, with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digitalmaterial so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardwareor software being used. The assumption is that machines and software formatsin use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.
"It is a global problem for the biggest governmentsand the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals," saidKen Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives program at theNational Archives and Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawersand den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disksand 3½-inch diskettes, even the larger 5¼-inch floppy disksfrom the 1980's. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that peoplecopy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD'sand other backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD'sand hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recordedwith a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it isexposed 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 becomescorrupted, 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 JeffreyRutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.
Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicatematerials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trappedin obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So theyare forced to devise their own stop-gap measures, most of them unwieldy,inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.
Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation inSan Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Sincehe was in elementary school, Mr. Cohen, 33, has been using a computer forhis school work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mailsince college.
Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousandsof photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.
Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, hascontinually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storageformats like CD's and DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward with thestuff I'm sentimental about," he said.
Yet Mr. Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CD's, especially therewritable variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a yearand 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 withever more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.
"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by beingdestroyed but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said. "It's one thingto find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what ifthose photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"
For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the binunder the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach toarchiving, means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.
Simon Yates, an analyst at ForresterResearch, for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneatha box. The machine contains everything in his life from the day he marriedin 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieveanything from the old PC, Mr. Yates said, it would require a great dealof wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office justto get it to boot up," he said.
Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializesin long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now, the museum approachmight be the most feasible answer.
"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable you'll beable to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancientcomputer available," said Mr. Schwartz, whose company has worked withthe Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.
"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," Mr. Schwartzsaid. "There's going to be a whole industry of people who will haveshops of old machines, like the original Mac Plus."
Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is theprintout method.
Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, LosAngeles, has been using computers since elementary school. She creates herown 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 ofcomputers," she said, "I actually think there's something aboutthe tangibility of paper that feels more comforting."
Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes topreserving photographs. If stored properly, conventional color photographsprinted from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading. Newerphotographic 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 "probablywill 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 eliminatedependence 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 hundredsof millions of photographs on their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backupset 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 offeredthis bit of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'llalways 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 amountof paper in his life to a minimum, and rarely makes printouts.
Dr. Quinn has a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains aneclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980's, when he startedout on an Amstrad computer.
All of Dr. Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable"he says) and other writings are on those various digital devices, alongwith his daily diaries.
At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for hischildren, but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad disksmore 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 peoplemight use, it is sure to be temporary.
"We will always be playing catch up," said Dr. Rutenbeck, whois working at pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives andstacks of old Zip disks.
"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn'tkeep a box of everything I did in first grade."