Alexandria II, aka Foundation

[Gent]

The University of California is supposed to be working on a system now that would seem to address the problem. It's called "Pergamum". It uses low power(<13 watts), multiple levels of redundancy for data (flash memory and hd) and an ethernet network. Basically, the system doesn't really care what the storage medium is, as long as it uses the simple protocol to talk to the rest of the system. Hopefully they pop a product out for you shortly. Simplicity, automation and redundancy.

Vaguely on topic - has anyone checked out the "Georgia Guidestones"? I love the concept behind those things. The implementation of these was flawed, but the idea is gold.

[jor-el]

The Earth Charter? A set of rules to establish a one world culture and government based on one fool's vision, with no basis for how it could be enforced without violating the charter.
Ignoring the idea of elimination of poverty and simultaneously respecting everyone's personal rights of property, it also places every religion and faith on equal terms which just can't work, because nearly each faith is aware of the presence of others, but cannot accept any others as equal.

Is that the idea you refer to?

[Gent]

Er - no. Preserving key concepts in stone.

[erich]

Worked on some software for these folks (http://www.ironmountain.com/) - and they look at storage for the long haul.
As in original pieces of film kept in deep salt mines (didn't get to do a tour, but a couple buddies of mine did, and it was pretty cool).

Anyway, one of the things being discussed when we were consulting with them was things like, storing not only the original media, but
also storing the device(s) used to read and/or create the media - like having a bunch of BETA MAX video tapes, several beta max players,
some beta max cameras (possibly - they were mostly interested in retrieving the data), and then backing up the actual data on
newer media and moving those archives forward as technology advanced (from video tape to hard drive to CD to DVD to solid state drive).

So, yes, this is a non-trivial problem that is still being puzzled over by leaders in the archival industry.

But for my money, I would want to:

1. Have redundant back ups of the original work.
2. Have redundant back ups of the data in several formats.
3. Continue saving the data onto newer / more durable / easily read formats.

Having all of the above duplicated in separate geographic locations would be good, too.

I agree that "write it to PDF and dump it onto a hard drive" is naive at best.
That sounds "ok" for #2 above, but doesn't obviate the need for #1 and #3 (and probably the #4 - #42 that I haven't thought of).

And after reading through my post again, "secure access to the original data and somehow maintaining the integrity of said data" should
be up there someplace. So that the work is saved, not someone's revision of the work (like, oh, the original Shakespeare in Klingon :p ).

I am not dead set against anything. I'm just pointing out the real challenges to electronic data storage for long term archival. You have to define a problem before you can develop the solution.

In my previous post I suggested several possible means of long term storage of electronic data.

The problem I see here is that you aren't seeing the scope of what you are proposing. You're talking about storing data in PDF on a hard drive and calling it Alexandria II. In 100 years, will PDF still be a readable format? Will the hard drive be able to be plugged into a computer to be read? Look how much computer hardware interfaces have changed in 20 years, and extrapolate the problem to 100 or 1000 years.

Say I discovered one of the first hard drives ever manufactured in the basement of a university, along with notes or documents to suggest that it contained valuable scientific research. First, no modern computer would have an interface to plug it in, so I'd have to build an interface adapter (provided I could find specs for the old interface) or I would have to cobble together scavenged antique computer hardware to read the disk.

Provided I can connect the disk and it spins up, I now have to read the data from it. If the documents were written in an antique proprietary format, that might be a big problem. And we're only talking about the span of decades here.

So I'm not naysaying just to aggravate, I'm trying to point out the real challenges to what you propose, so that real solutions might be discussed.

--Hatch