 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2010-09-30 17:41
DavidBlumberg wrote:
> Interesting article about the digital age and how files can be
> so easily lost forever.
I actually disagree with them. As with lots of the analog stuff (such as Marcellus master classes & baseball games), the "official" digital stuff gets lost & disappears - or was never cataloged to begin with, or isn't really lost but misplaced withing the shelves in the library. Which drives the "treasure hunting" trips through old & dusty archives around the world. You never know what you'll find because not everything has been catalogued. I once asked one of the NYPL music archivists how much music was uncataloged and he started laughing ... there are boxes of material from various prominent musicians and composers that are still uncataloged after many years - too much stuff, not enough time.
The personal copies stay with us. For instance, when I wanted to rebuild the Klarinet mailing list archives with all the posts from the inception of the list, the University that was handling the mailing list had deleted all the early BITNET archives.
I had offers from multiple people to restore the posts from their provate collections.
So ... we have many more private collectors of digital media today than ever before - we don't have to depend on a librarian to keep a current record, though keeping everything in a library would be nice.
As to the aging of media - we move things as the technology changes. An awful lot of people have moved their data from CDs to DVDs since it makes the library more compact - and at the same time it "refreshes" the bits of the digital recording. Libraries don't have the funds to do that, which makes their CD collection suspect as they age.
The chances of a digital collection of music being copied and shared, irregardless of the legal ramifications, ensures that the recordings will be available in essence as long as they remain interesting to future generations.
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2010-09-30 17:46
It seemed to be advocating the copying of files so that they are spread out to various sources such as you mentioned, and that copyright law can supress some of that being more publically available.
I have my files on a backup digitally, and another backup digitally which isn't onsite. (not online, a physical backup drive but not at my house).
That way if I'm devastated by a virus, etc I've still got a backup I can go to.
5 years for a burned DVD?????
http://www.SkypeClarinetLessons.com
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2010-09-30 17:56
DavidBlumberg wrote:
> 5 years for a burned DVD?????
For a cheap DVD not stored correctly. For a good DVD, burned properly, check for errors, and stored properly, last I read was at most 50 years for archival purposes.
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Author: SteveG_CT
Date: 2010-09-30 18:15
Kodak is now claiming over 100 years for their archival grade DVD's.
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Author: davetrow
Date: 2010-09-30 23:25
I suspect the archival life of an analogue LP can be measured in centuries with proper storage.
And we still have no practical digital storage medium that lasts anywhere near as long as paper.
Dave Trowbridge
Boulder Creek, CA
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2010-10-01 00:55
Even paper gets iffy in the digital age. Recently, working on an article for Scarlet, I hunted up some files I'd researched and then printed out about 28 years ago. The ink (dot matrix printer) has turned pale brown. Give it another fifty years and I wouldn't be surprised if those pages look blank. The cheap paper is already brittle, too.
I do regularly update my files. Those were originally on 5-1/4" floppies. I'd transferred them to 3-1/2" floppies, then to CDs and later to a flash drive. When I found the files on the flash drive, I discovered that the latest version of WordPerfect can't recognize the format. That generation of word processing got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the line. I probably used PC-Write, a now-antique shareware program, on a first-generation IMB-PC, the kind with 16K RAM and no hard drive. Thumbing through more recent printouts, I'm seeing even faster deterioration of the ink color from inkjet printers.
Meanwhile, my husband, a pro bookbinder (trade name Aldus Book Repair and Restoration -- Kevin gets most of his clients through his main customer, Second Story Books in Bethesda, MD), restores 500-year-old books that remain perfectly legible, on still-supple paper.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: davetrow
Date: 2010-10-01 02:13
Well, I had acid-free, archival paper in mind.
A few years back I tore out some 50+ year-old heating ducts from under a house I lived in at the time. The ducts were wrapped in newspapers from the 1930s, still quite legible, although the paper was fragile. That despite the exposure to heat!
Dave Trowbridge
Boulder Creek, CA
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2010-10-01 02:25
Lelia Loban wrote:
> When I found the files on
> the flash drive, I discovered that the latest version of
> WordPerfect can't recognize the format. That generation of
> word processing got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the
> line.
Extracting the text (sans formatting) is pretty easy. However, formatting oftentimes offers further information as to intent.
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Author: tictactux ★2017
Date: 2010-10-01 07:22
davetrow wrote:
> I suspect the archival life of an analogue LP can be measured in centuries
> with proper storage.
> And we still have no practical digital storage medium that lasts anywhere
> near as long as paper.
What good is an archival medium that last 500 years if we don't have the apparatus to access the thusly stored data? And if we can access the data, we can't make any sense of it because of some forgotten format...
Hey, I have some 5.25" floppies with data. Anyone with a 5.25" drive still attached to their computer? (And in this case we're talking 10 years here...)
Elcaset? brzzzt.
3", 5.25", 8" Floppies? brzzzt.
QIC tapes? brzzzt.
Zip, Jaz, Bernoulli drives? brzzzt.
Videodisc? brzzzt.
"Analog" storage (paper, photos etc) is much easier accessible as the contents is not coded in any way.
--
Ben
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Author: tictactux ★2017
Date: 2010-10-01 08:19
mihalis wrote:
> Nothing beats the good old stone tablets.:)
Aka "JurassicPad (TM)" ![[tongue]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie6.gif)
--
Ben
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2010-10-01 17:59
Ben -
I have a 5.25" eternal drive with a serial port connector and a 3.5" external drive with a USB connector. I got them during the changeover periods and have kept them for "just in case" use. I think any computer repair shop will have them, and at least internal ones are available on eBay for around $10. 3.5" external USB drives are readily available for around $20.
Anything you have on 5.25" disks is likely to be useless, other than document files. You should definitely copy at least these to your hard disk ASAP. I'd say the same for what you have on 3.25" disks. There are no "mine's older than yours" bragging rights, at least for anything you want to keep. For long-term storage, you should probably convert word-processor-formatted files to plain text. There are free programs that can do mass converts for most of the old WP formats.
Older word processing files are not large, and as TXT files they're even smaller. I got all of mine onto one CD. You could also tuck them in a directory on your current hard disk, where the effect on disk space would be negligible.
You might play and show off a Mozart-era clarinet, but you wouldn't use it in a modern orchestra. The same goes for document files.
Ken Shaw
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Author: tictactux ★2017
Date: 2010-10-01 19:17
Ken,
thanks for the heads-up.
Yes, I have converted all my stuff into space-age formats and storage media.
But when I think of those zillion bits stored in some library/bank/hospital vault, then I am inclined to believe that we'll be the "generations with no records", as most of the magnetic media is past their prime, and there's no equipment to access them anyway (do you have an 8" floppy drive?).
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but when I think that we (or probably every archeologist or space alien as well) can still access microfilmed newspaper clippings from 60 years ago, or age-old photographic glass negatives but are unable to retrieve a five-year-old article on some science-oriented internet page, well, then this gives me the creeps, a bit at least.
--
Ben
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Author: mihalis
Date: 2010-10-01 23:09
I agree that we should do our best to preserve and protect our data in
our lifetime (images, music etc ) but am pretty sure that some time in the
future, our relatives we leave behind, will have a big garage sale, and the rest goes to the rubbish tip.
I have seen it happen again and again.
A good example is the photos we print.
We use the best archival ink and paper, but will your future relatives
keep and preserve your photos?
Mike.
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Author: davetrow
Date: 2010-10-01 23:12
"What good is an archival medium that last 500 years if we don't have the apparatus to access the thusly stored data?"
Ah, but the thing about LPs is that the "coding" is a 1-to-1 physical relationship, so it would be easy to figure out how to extract the information. (There was a guy who could identify classical pieces just by looking at LPs.)
Digital, on the other hand, relies on encoding schemes that are in some sense arbitrary, and thus more difficult recover.
Dave Trowbridge
Boulder Creek, CA
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2010-10-01 23:47
davetrow wrote:
> Digital, on the other hand, relies on encoding schemes that are
> in some sense arbitrary, and thus more difficult recover.
Non-compressed formats are trivial to decode. Compressed formats might be significantly more difficult, but assuming civilization doesn't go totally by the wayside I wouldn't worry too much about decoding.
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