Here’s bit rot in a nutshell:
At The Guardian’s 2013 Activate conference in London, the computer scientist and Internet founder Vint Cerf, when asked about the future of libraries in the digital age, expressed concern. “I am really worried right now about the possibility of saving bits but losing their meaning and ending up with bit rot,” he said. “You have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what they mean because the software that was needed to interpret them is no longer available or it’s no longer executable … This is a serious, serious problem, and we have to solve that.”
There are legacy image formats that are no longer supported. Over time, the ability to import those formats will disappear from current software. This same is true for legacy text editing formats.
Just as we search for ways to preserve our ancient video and photographic images, it’s critical that we work out a mechanism for preserving our digital archives. Interesting article.
Hmm, this is bit rot? The inability to open your old files because of obsolete formats? I don’t this so. I believe bit rot is when bits of your data flip from 0 to 1 or vice versa, because of physical decay of the media on which it is stored. As John Siracusa often points out, the worst part is, when this happen on a normal HFS, FAT or NTFS volume, we have no idea!
Paper keeps working.
That isn’t bit rot.
Paper suffers from regular rot. Though I agree it typically lasts longer than the viability of binary formats.
Granted, but the means for preserving paper keep getting better. The means for preserving old data formats keep getting more difficult.
Actually, if we take special care to ensure we still have algorithms and documentation required, it would be infinitely easier to ensure digital data lasts longer than physical paper. One is a process problem. The other is a scientific problem.
Not to mention a deprecated-hardware problem. How are your magneto-optical disc drives holding up?
I agree with the others that this isn’t really bit rot. But it’s interesting nonetheless, so let’s talk about it.
I think there’s a few standards we’ll be able to rely on in the future. Things like plain text; even if we lost the details for the Win Latin 1252 or MacRoman, for instance, plain text documents ought to be readable. From there, you’d be able to read specs on the other technologies, assuming such specs exist. So really, make sure you’re saving in a popular, publicly documented (if not necessarily “open”) format. Same with images, same with videos. A lot harder with videos.
We’ll move past H264, but I doubt we’ll ever completely lose the ability to play it.
Mine’s clicking.
If I shove a rolled up bit of paper under it it works fine though. : )
Don’t you think though that, unless something is encrypted, that in the future we will actually be even more capable of reading “legacy” formats? As long as the data is there and readable, the rest is all a matter of engineering. Something I would presume will get better as time goes on.
Not if manufacturers are no longer interested in building or servicing drives for outmoded formats.
True. I guess I am thinking in terms like a Star Trek future. Something almost magical to us now where any magnetic media could be read without the original device. Hold the device over any magnetic media, it reads the binary and compiles it. Of course this is way out there thinking and I agree we should be looking for ways to keep information up to date. It’s just fun to think of.
It’s fun, but unlikely for anything practical in the near-term, other than storytelling. We’re not going to get a Star Trek future. We’ll be lucky if we get Firefly.
We’ll get there. Half full?
I used to hope so. It’d take a lot longer than three centuries, if at all.
Copy off the old format once. Then throw them away.
We’re already “past” the problem of outdated media, with ubiquitous networking and backups for extant data., in every meaningful way, for any use that cares.
(n.b. I have two, and last I checked they both worked fine, though I’d have to monkey around a little to rig up a SCSI port to connect them with.
I’m pretty sure my SyQuest drive still works, too, though I wouldn’t trust the media to not have fungal rot.)
Data formats are a different problem than physical device access.
Remember, going forward, any data we’re serious about “keeping” will be attached to a network and redundantly backed up, not locked on a physical device in one place with only one access format.
I don’t miss my SyQuest. I certainly don’t miss Jaz. Zip, I’m a bit ambivalent about.
If we’re going to suppose a Star Trek future, part of that would be having the specs available for analysis. 🙂
The problem of legacy software not being supported is different from bit rot, of course. Here’s Steve Spinrite on bit rot. https://www.grc.com/sr/whatitdoes.htm
We don’t need it come up with a mechanism, it is already here. Good archives have programs set up where content formats are updated and/or old software kept to read what can’t be updated while it is being reconstructed. Optical disks are refreshed, hard drives are copied to new ones, magnetic tape is copied either to another tape or a drive. It’s all written out, scheduled etc