On the other hand, storing data for an active/continuously used archive doesn't seem so hard. You just keep the data digitally on some media and every few years you upgrade the tech to whatever technology and formats are "current" before the old format and tech is completely forgotten. Keeping digital data around for a decade is pretty easy. If you do that 100 times in a row you have kept it for a thousand years and you never had a file format or a storage media older than a decade. You could "forget" to upgrade the archive, but you could also "forget" to scribble on the calfs some time.
50 years ago and all those letters that were burnt or composted because no one bothered to keep the sentimental letters of soldiers in a world war.
20 years later and all those millions of photos that were on Flickr but no one bothered to upgrade.
100 years later and all those GPS logs from taxi cabs that were logged by firms are lost as no one thought they would be interesting or useful.
600 years later and these floppy disks with meeting minutes on them about an early internet organization are lost but might well be worth more than they are now.
Roll-over to new tech is safe. The content of discussion is inherently reliable due to its digital nature.
Keeping multiple copies is necessary practice and the long-time trend is that the next copy you produce has no greater cost than the previous copy (if you wait years, it will be significantly cheaper).
"Just". Have fun justifying the cost of re-encoding and re-archiving all of the laws of the UK every few years. The advantage of vellum is that once it's written, that's it. You don't need to go back and re-encode and upgrade to the latest storage technology. It's there, and it'll last literally a thousand years if it's stored in a reasonably dry, cold, and dark location.
But you need to avoid the mistakes that people have already made: using some weird format that dies, and then having all your data locked away in a semi-readable file.
Some formats that are no longer usable in general, such as punch cards, were obsoleted consciously. And you might struggle to find a LaserDisc reader. Otherwise, we should be fine. Or am I missing something?
"The third disk here is the only known copy of the original design documents for Loom. It's an 800K Macintosh floppy employing a proprietary format readable only by a vintage Macintosh drive (thank you Apple). In preparing for this lecture, I obtained a dusty old Mac which had not been turned on since 1997. After reseating all the cables and boards I got it to boot and determined that the files on that disk are still intact and still fully readable. A few moments after making this happy discovery however, and before I could actually retrieve those files, the hard drive in the Mac crashed and died permanently. I'll recover the files eventually, but for now you'll have to rely on my failing memory for how Loom was conceived."
[1]: http://ludix.com/moriarty/loom.html (I transcribed the passage above from the video)
So imagine you have generations of digital files, converted from format to format to format. Why? Because software engineers are assholes who keep inventing new formats, for stupid goddamn reasons. A hundred generations from now, you'll be looking at copies of copies of copies which aren't just checksumable bit-wise copies but transcriptions, with transcription errors. If our descendants are lucky, all of those different versions will be preserved as well, but that just means that if you notice a possible transcription error, you'll have the opportunity to dig into two hundred year old character and file encodings to try to figure out what the original text was.
Which is not that different of a situation from trying to guess whether a scribe three copies ago misread the scribe four copies ago's atrocious f for a t.
"During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by magnetic tape, as better, more capable computers became available. ... [P]unched cards were still commonly used for data entry and programming until the mid-1980s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage ... made punched cards obsolete ..."[1]
Yes, I listed wikipedia as a primary source, deal with it.
I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to open them. I don't even have a way of getting them off the floppy.
But yes, I use it, both professionally and personally. Legacy MUMPS is not pleasant -- the VA's code looks like someone left their telegraph out in the rain -- but the language is astonishingly good at string-handling, mostly due to certain constructs that make it very hard to translate into normal languages.
Edit: On further consideration, I think we have to regard digital media and formats like a form of encryption (a simile, I don't mean this literally) which gets stronger over time. Time will bury extant evidence of what is contained on the media and how it is stored. Why should not make the information as explicit (plain-text) as possible? People in 800 years will still have to spend their efforts decoding early 21st century English legalese.
Compare and contrast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book#Custodial_histor...
Ah, the classic sign of someone about to say something rash about technology.
That said, waiting the full duration of a material's projected life span before actual use of that material would limit options hugely, especially with the massively increasing corpus of generated data.
In this sort of context (amount of data) one can spread your bets and use vellum, as well as other methods, until other more stable forms of storage are easily available.
Interesting piece released yesterday related to long term data storage; a projected lifespan of 13.8 billion years doesn't sound too bad... University of Southampton - http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-up...
No no. This doesn't make sense. If we're not going to put our treasured documents on archival paper until we've proved that archival paper really will last for centuries, they're never going to be put on archival paper, no matter how great it might or might not be, because we'll all be dead.
You wanted to say we should see how archival paper pans out before we stop printing our treasured documents on other types of material.
It is more like the way the Long Now Foundation wants to build a clock that will run unattended for 10.000 years (http://longnow.org/clock/)
I personally would go for clay tablets, rather than vellum.
Automation won't hack it either. At the moment, the most complex machine that we know how to make persist into deep time is a very simple clock [2], and even that requires human intervention.
In Anathem [3], Neal Stephenson speculates on what this combo of culture and deep-time technology might look like.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
Archival paper is tested by artificially aging it (e.g. exposure to heat and moisture to simulated passage of time.) Some long-term tests are underway to determine whether accelerated aging tests accurately simulate the natural aging process.[1] And there are associated standards, e.g. ISO 5630-3.[2] But you are correct, we really have no proof of how modern archival paper will perform over a multi-century timeline.
[1]https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/100-yr_... [2]http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_...
Archivists are acutely aware of the obsolescence of digital formats and media. And the solution cannot be just printing them out on vellum or archival paper because increasingly records are being created digitally that cannot be meaningfully or adequately converted into printed formats. I am talking about records that are audio, video, high resolution photographs (like those that NASA is seeking to preserve digitally) etc. Even emails when printed out onto paper would be missing a lot contextual information that would have been kept if you preserved it as a digital format like EML or MSG.
So, existing digital preservation systems may still be imperfect, but nevertheless we still need find improved solutions for preserving them digitally.
I don't work for CCSDS or Preservica. I work for a national archive as a specialist on digital records and archives, but my background is in IT having spent about 15 years in software development.
Doing this doesn't cost much, and it's a basic archive of the business of the people worth keeping in human readable form.
At the end of the day, tech is good, but the business of people needs to be human readable, accessible in a court, trusted by all. This is a basic requirement humans have, and without it in place, we are forced to trust and depend on tech for law, and it's real consequences.
Nothing wrong with using tech, mind you. We can, should and do. It's more efficient.
But, say something bad happens. That's what the vellum is for.
Digital long term storage is just, no. Look, all key UK documents are ALREADY digital they're available to download right now. However we aren't talking about digital Vs. non-digital, we're talking about what to store BACKUPS on.
Digital long term storage is something people who frankly know little about technology point to. It is up to IT-types to figure out the costs and the "how?" from then on out. There is no digital storage media which will still exist reliably in 200-400 years, not CDs, not HDDs, and not SSDs. Tapes are the closest and they won't last that long.
So we aren't talking about slapping it on a CD and storing it in some archive, we're talking about slapping it on a piece of digital media today and then moving it every one hundred years without fail, or we lose it forever... If one government or generation loses interest then future generations suffer (see the current government as an example: moving away from reliable Vellum to unproven papers).
Plus with digital you also have to worry about: solar flares/EMP, format knowledge (both of the file system & file format), media protocol knowledge (SATA or CDs might be forgotten technology), and the ability to alter historical documents without detection (not that vallum is immune, but it requires more skill/time).
PS - The "Digital Preservation Coalition" are a group of historians and archivists. They aren't technologists, they just point blindly at digital without explaining the nitty gritty of HOW.