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Data Storage: Bit Rot Threatens to Leave Behind a Digital Dark Age
Vint Cerf, a “father of the Internet” and now Google Vice President, is warning that we’re at risk of losing massive amounts data to future generations. Our current culture might well become a “digital dark age” mystery to historians.
Cerf said that “when you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the World Wide Web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history. We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artifacts that we digitized. If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
‘Bit Rot’ may be part of the problem. As hardware and software continues to evolve at a breakneck speed obsoleting older less-efficient technologies, data not migrated forward to be stored with newer technologies are at risk of being irrecoverably lost. Storage media and today’s proprietary file formats may not be accessible in the future.
In 2007, the Storage Networking Industry Association offered a plan to build a “100 year archive”, but it was never implemented. The problem is that right now the problem doesn’t seem urgent and no company, group or agency that sees any incentive for funding such a project.
Cerf said that “we don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.”
