Brrrrrr … The Digital Ice Age!
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 22 Feb 2007 | Tagged as: Technology
It’s been fairly cold in Richmond recently and snow has been building up on the mountains again. Even though it’s winter in Canada, there is no snow in this city. We’ve had a few snow storms, but all of it melted away in a couple of weeks. This is one of the advantages of living in the Pacific Northwest.
You may have heard of people talking about another kind of deep freeze coming … a digital ice age. It has nothing to do with ice cold temperatures destroying your computer or PDA. This is about the data files you create from applications today becoming unreadable some time in the future. Your letters and digital photos are in a certain file format; in this case it’s probably a Microsoft Word (.doc) and JPEG (.jpg), respectively. The computer you’ll be using 10 years from now may not have software that can read these files anymore. Software evolves, so .doc and .jpg formats may be replaced by something superior. The new software may not have backwards compatibility for today’s files.
A problem can also occur if the digital files you have stored on some media can no longer be read in the future. The floppy disk that most computer users still remember is being phased out. PC World announced that it will not replace its stock of floppy disks once they are sold out. There is no longer a need for floppy disks. CD’s, DVD’s, and flash drives store vastly more information than a floppy could. More and more computers are being sold without floppy drives. Macs haven’t had these drives for many years now.
Not too long ago, 5.25” drives were common in PC’s. Today, I can’t read my old disks because I don’t have a 5.25” drive installed on my computer. Soon, my 3.5” disks will be unreadable when I don’t have the appropriate disk drive installed.
There is also the danger of a floppy disk or CD/DVD degrading so that parts of it or the whole thing can no longer be read.
Hence, the digital ice age.
Many writers of the digital ice age despair that nothing can be done and we’re all going to lose lots of valuable data. Nothing can be further from the truth.
When new software supports new file formats, they almost always can read the popular file formats today. If not, no one would use the application. We will have plenty of time to convert our Word 2003 documents to Word 2007. There are also many open source programs that can read very old formats, such as WordStar. You can then save your document in Rich Text Format which most word processors can read today.
If your future computer can’t use 3.5” floppy drives, chances are you will still have an old computer around which can still use it. Computers devalue so much that they’re not worth selling. It’s better to keep it and have a second machine available to use when the other one is busy. The older computer can connect to the newer by a network and then you can transfer all of your data to it.
The only real danger we have is the digital media being damaged, or wearing out. This is something we can’t really do anything about other than frequently checking the media and making multiple backups. It’s unlikely all backups would become corrupt.
One of the most reliable ways of storing documents is by printing them. Paper will easily outlast any digital media that exists today. One disadvantage is that printed documents can be cumbersome. A 10,000 page volume of books takes a lot of space. The equivalent as a digital file may only be 30 MB in size which can easily be saved with today’s technologies.
We can prevent a digital ice age by carefully managing our data. Frequent backups are a necessity as well as checking the integrity of the data. A DVD is good for making backups. With HD-DVD emerging, you’ll be able to transfer your DVD backups there. An HD-DVD has the capacity of storing more than 5 DVD’s.
Also, watch the file formats that new software use. You may need to resave your documents or import them to the new application.
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