Who will Preserve Your Digital Data?
Almost every piece of information we access today is stored somewhere in digital form--think iPod, YouTube, digital cameras, mobile phones, not to mention our personal and professional information spread across LinkedIn, social networking sites and blogs. It's difficult to imagine life without digital data in this information age. But who manages it? And, more importantly, who will preserve it?
In this month's edition of Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the "data deluge" and offers a guide on how to manage and preserve your digital information.
Many people assume that their data will be available whenever they need to access it, but most of us have had a hard drive crash; we've seen various forms of storage media such as floppy disks and zip drives become obsolete, some of us have even had problems accessing content in the cloud, as evidenced recently when Gmail was down, so we all know that storage of and access to electronic data is not always without problems.
"Loss, damage, and unavailability of important digital business, historical, and official documents regularly make the news further highlighting our dependence on electronic information," writes Berman.
Storage: How Much is Enough?
According to a 2008 IDC white paper, 2007 marked the "crossover" year, when there was more digital data created than data storage to host it. The IDC report also projected that by 2011 the amount of digital data created will be more than twice the amount of available storage.
Bottom line? We don't produce storage capacity at the same rate we produce digital information.
Who is responsible for Data Preservation?
Increasingly, policies and regulations are being set to regulate large data sets and digital information within large organizations across the world; Sarbanes-Oxley promotes responsible management of digital financial records, HIPAA looks after digital medical records (US), and the Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library (UK), as well as the National Library of Australia (AU) are among some of the organizations that support the preservation of digital information across the globe.
While most people agree that certain digital information is preservation worthy or of historical value to society, what about the digital pictures you took on your last holiday? Who is in charge of preserving them so that the next generation can access them?
In a nutshell, you are. While the Communications article ends with Berman's top ten recommendations for data preservation, here are three things you can do right now:
- Make a plan: Determine who is going to be in charge of your digital data once you are no longer capable of looking after it.
- Make multiple copies: When it comes to valuable data, store it in different formats at different locations
- Migrate to new technologies: Don't wait for storage media to become obsolete, migrate to new technologies and formats as they become available.
Finally, with some cloud services offering free data storage, it's worth considering moving some of your data online. Take a look at our write up on online storage services for ideas on where to start.
Image credit: Data Storage Old and New - Thanks IanS
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This problem - with the Cloud forming - is big and only growing more massive by the day.
My approach thus far has been to bury my head in the sand and not worry about it. Working nicely so far. :)
2. Is sometimes difficult to manage , between CDs, DVDs, HD, external HD, online b/up we might loose controle
We have all lost stuff sometime to crashes whatever. But I can't back up my blog even though it is supposed to be possible.
As far as I am concerned even family holiday photos are of value. I saw the only moving footage around of my Grandfather this year. It was shot 30 years ago. It blew my mind.
I go to a lot of effort to back up stuff. But it costs a lot of thought, time and money. It needs to be made easier. BUT the most important issue is backward compatibility. Could you get information off a 3.5 inch floppy if you needed to? Probably not, yet that was the mainstay for information storage 'less than 10 years ago'. But even worse than that. Even if you could read it, would the data be intact. The storage issues with tapes, CD's, DVD's etc is shocking. Paper is still the best we have, see - http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bap/1998/msg00003.html It is an enormous problem and few see it for what it is. Solutions? There are few trustworthy solutions about.
IMO For digital archivin
i like KK's term [movage] in this context.
"anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward"
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/12/movage.php
#3 reminds me that I need to get back into that pile of VHS and SVHS tapes that are the only remaining copies of some of my school projects. To me, the migration of data from format to format is the biggest challenge over the long haul. That's not just storage formats, but codex, compression schemes, etc... they're all important to keep migrating along.
when one talks about data preservation one assumes backup, which is why I use Carbonite for my backup solution. External drives can be lost/stolen but cloud backup will always be there. Check out the service here http://carbonite.com/ its worth the small amount of money it costs for piece of mind...