quartz/content/notes/22-digital-preservation.md

title	aliases	tags	sr-due	sr-interval	sr-ease
22-digital-preservation		comp210 lecture	2023-01-16	63	270

how long will data survive?

data rot

• eveything wears out
• digital media degrades
  • unreadable media
  • damaged files
  • backups may help
• hardware and software becomes obsolete
  • cloud service shut down
  • os no longer exists
  • no device to read media
  • no software to read files
• format documentation non-existent or missing
• file system changes - lost metadata

Dark ages 2

preservation of digital material

• continuous format migration

  • everytime you upgrade software, convert all documents
  • document changes, keep old versions

• emulation of olf hardware

  • open things in original evironment

• standardised preservation formats

  • pdf/pda
  • not designed for convenient editing

• dont know original format?

  • lots of tools, but user unfriendly and somwhat limited
  • need to find version and which software

• in cloud

  • e.g., social media, websites
    • things are changing
    • acquisitions, bankruptcy
    • link rot
  • internet archive
    • aims to archive everything
    • crawl websites (wayback machine)
    • digitise of magazines and films
    • over 100 petabytes
    • controversy over copyright
    • only static content

• most national archive organisations are doing similar

• not eveything is accessable

• some services let you export your data

what happens when you die

• or stoke etc
• few legel precedents
• prohibit giving password to someone else
• "memorialise an account"