Smith, Todd wrote: > > > Please note that we don't have this system installed yet, we are closely > examining it for purchase. It might be a pack of lies, but it the only > technology that I have found that even has a chance of lasting the 100 years > needed. > It just might. Please note that this uses an analog storage medium with human readable data as the key to making it work. Kodak does have the experience from the film world to understand what it takes. One can take a look at the history of movie film and understand the terrible loss of content and the vast expense of restoring the content that remains to understand what the long term costs might be like and what kinds of things you need to plan for.
The other caveat with all this new technology is that it really must be available from more than one vendor, I think. Movie film had many sources all along the production chain. The only pure digital possibility that I see is if the public interconnected internet continues to grow and thrive in a relatively unfettered and free way. A recent article in Scientific American outlined the possibilties here: Let's say you want to keep a permanent digital archive of your home computer contents, say a digital photo archive. Let's also suppose you and several million other people have downloaded a distributed file service program that works like a combination of seti@home and napster. You volunteer space on your machine and so do millions of others, and you all spread your data out, in a redundant, replicable way. Now, if your computer fails, your data is still safe on the network. Note that this solution requires every participant to have more storage than they need at all times! Given the growth in hard drive capacity and price, the equation looks good right now, but it may change over a 100 year time span. Also, I/O bandwidth is not following Moore's law and that a fundamentally bad thing over a long period of time. That's what makes such high tech solutions challenging. The other challenge to this is the free and open nature of the Internet, which is rapdily changing on us. Let's go back to the above distributed file sharing example. I want to keep my personal data to myself, so I use some form of encryption or data splitting, i.e. the network providers can't see or understand the content. Well, since I could be sharing copyright material, such systems are now considered technical means to violate digital copyright and along comes various parties to sue under DMCA and the whole service is shut down! It can't be shut down at a source, since it's has no central controlling point (unlike Napster) and that means the only way to shut it down is by exercising control over the network by the ISP's. Just look at all the content filters being put in place and you will see what is happening. btw: I appreciate your offer Tim, but we asked and for our purposes (non medical records) we had no reason to preserve them so they got dumped. But I do think you would agree that in a large scale enterprise the costs for keeping a service like yours available for a 100 years are significant. My main point was not that it couldn't be done at all, but as time passes the costs go up. I remember reading about some guy who rebuilt a paper tape player piano to resurrect some orginal recording by artists in the early part of the last century. I actually have a CD of Gustav Mahler playing the piano from such a roll.
