the digital now — epic fail

Or the sorry state of backup in modern digital world. Do you remember the good old times? Well sure you do, because we have got old newspapers in archives, photographs at home, several centuries old books etc. We do have this legacy because it’s an analog legacy. Of course it’s possible to lose this information too due physical forces, like water, fire, temperature and other different environmental conditions. But usually they are quiet safe, archaeologists or historians wouldn’t have any clue about past civilizations without it.

But what about the present data? What about those bits and bytes we are using to store our precious information nowadays? Pictures, movies, newspapers, mails etc. pp.? How do you preserve it? Archives are using different approaches to store the data for the eternity, most of them are from the old analog world — guess why? But joe average has got a huge problem: usually he cannot use most of these backup strategies — they are expensive or not usable at all.

So in the end most people don’t care and don’t realize how the destroy any possible clue for their heirs or future generations — a really big cultural-historical damage.

But what is the solution for joe average? DVDs? DVDs are prone to fail — don’t store any valuable data you rely on. Tapes? Way too expensive, but otherwise very reliable for backup purposes. Raid? You must be kidding, Raid is no backup. It’s an insurance for some bad luck, no real archivist would even consider this for more than temporary data. Thumb-drives, floppy disks anyone? Now it gets funny …

The poor mans only choice is to rescue the data again again from one medium to another. Buy some big harddrives and mirror the data, harddrives are cheap. Quality-wise sometimes a disaster, but good enough if you work with mirrors and check your hardware quiet often.

One last remark: forget about services in the clouds, the so-called cloud-computing. It’s a temporary solution only. Amazon S3, flickr et al. are solutions maybe for data transportation or presentation. For your data-treasuries you should trust only something you have absolute control of. Well you cannot hinder an earthquake, power-loss or something similar — but I think you’re already seeing the pattern ;-)