The Problem
Anyone who wishes to archive material, be it images, documents, or videos, is faced with an almost unsolvable problem when one considers our over-reliance on new technology. Computer drives are predicted to have a life span of five years, flash cards even shorter. Magnetic creep, doping chemical migration in semi-conductors, failing physical parts, and other issues deny longtime archival on information in any real and reliable sense.
Microscopists, like photographers, and film makers are interested in preserving recorded imagery. I'm also a film maker and with several feature films completed, I am concerned at how I keep the masters for long term safety without losing the material. Films take up a lot of file space and keeping an edited master requires a minimum of 25 Gigabytes of data space. This equates to a Blue-Ray disc, single sided. The best methods used by data centres involve exploiting Raid technology where data is written across two or more drives so any failure of a single drive means it can be replaced (the drive) and the data copied back from the remaining working drive. For the home user, the process is to copy off whole drives to new ones every few years.
People believe DVDs and Blue Ray discs will retain their data for long periods of time. What most don't know is that these discs are fragile and data on them is easily corrupted and destroyed, with many poorly made ones breaking down due to unstable chemistry after a few years. It's highly likely that even National Archival institutes like The British Library are tearing their hair out trying to establish durable methods for storing their documents, books, and references.
I recently watched a documentary where the chap charged with recording where all the French Nuclear Power Stations radioactive waste is stored, has resorted, to paper, discs, and a new method he developed to store information on genetic code. A worry problem if future generations lose sight of huge dumps of radioactive material buried deep beneath their feet!
A Solution?
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