Old, But Still Around

By David Rubinstein

April 23, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
A rare gateway to ancient history was stumbled upon in 1947, when a group of Bedouins, looking for a stray goat, entered into caves near the Dead Sea between Israel and Jordan and found jars containing religious scrolls that were determined to be about 2,000 years old.

These scrolls were written in Hebrew and Aramaic on parchment, wrapped in linens, and placed in ceramic jars for safekeeping when hidden in the caves. And when they were found, it was not difficult to make sense of the words within the scrolls and fragments; people knowledgeable about those languages could easily understand their meaning.

Now, imagine if the words in those scrolls were preserved on 8-track tape. It would be significantly more difficult to retrieve the information, as players for that kind of tape are harder and harder to locate. Some day, when there are no functional players left, that information would be irretrievable.

This scenario concerns the Data Management Forum of the not-for-profit Storage Networking Industry Association. So they have seated a "100-Year Archive Committee" to set standards for the retrieval of data a century from now, when tape readers are obsolete, and the tapes themselves have degraded to the point of being ruined.

"Data needs to be readable and understandable in the future, even when the people who created it, or the systems it ran on, are no longer around," said Craig Mullins, co-chairman of the archive committee and chief technologist at NEON Enterprise Software.

If you look back 35 years—and Mullins said most people think of long-term storage as 10 to 15 years—you'd find most people working in an organization of any real size would have used a mainframe computer with data stored on punch cards. "To read those cards today, you'd have to go to a museum" that had a punch card reader, he said.

There are two parts to the problem: physical and logical. It's one thing to preserve the data on a medium from which it can be retrieved. It's another to be able to interpret that data and understand what it means.

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