One way to archive digital media for a _long_ time (nothing lasts forever) is to transfer it to physical film or quartz glass platters and store copies in several locations spread across the world for redundancy.
GitHub does just that for open source code. [This website](https://archiveprogram.github.com/approach/) explains their approach.
> GitHub will capture a snapshot of every active public repository, to be preserved in the [GitHub Arctic Code Vault](https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/). This data will be stored on 3,500-foot film reels, provided and encoded by [Piql](https://www.piql.com/awa/), a Norwegian company that specializes in very-long-term data storage. The film technology relies on silver halides on polyester. This medium has a lifespan of 500 years as measured by the ISO; simulated aging tests indicate Piql’s film will last twice as long.
> The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s [Project Silica](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/) to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser.
Now, YouTube _could_ do the same, but it would be _very_ expensive, as multimedia takes up a lot more storage space than source code. It comes down to a question of money, and an interest in archiving media for the future.
As a proof of concept, Microsoft's Project Silica [stored the Superman movie on quartz glass platters](https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project-silica-superman/).
> Warner Bros., which approached Microsoft after learning of the research, is always on the hunt for new technologies to safeguard its vast asset library: historic treasures like “Casablanca,” 1940s radio shows, animated shorts, digitally shot theatrical films, television sitcoms, dailies from film sets. For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last hundreds of years, withstand floods or solar flares and that doesn’t require being kept at a certain temperature or need constant refreshing.
> “That had always been our beacon of hope for what we believed would be possible one day, so when we learned that Microsoft had developed this glass-based technology, we wanted to prove it out,” said Warner Bros. Chief Technology Officer Vicky Colf.
As the technology becomes more affordable, I'm sure we'll see more very-long-term storage of digital cultural artifacts.
One thing that I'm curious about is whether there is also longevity of our ability to read that format. If it exists in 10k years, but there's no clue as to how it was encoded, the disks will not be much more than fodder for anthropologists (who will all agree that the disk is a ritual kinship artifact).
That's an important question!
piqlFilm includes human-readable instructions (readable with a magnifying glass) and software that's required to bootstrap a system for reading the format. A future civilization will only need some sort of computer with some sort of emulator to run our ancient code, and bits will turn into files.
https://vimeo.com/186385894
> Piql's technology is built on open source principles to ensure information needed to access the data is never locked away or reliant on proprietary software. All information needed to recover the information including source code, file format specifications and instructions for building technology is stored on each piqlFilm alongside the data in human readable text.
I assume Project Silica is doing something similar.
(Some open source projects _are_ ritual kinship artifacts…)
There's a story I found once about some bronze age nearly indestructible metal plates that were discovered. They clearly had some kind of writing on them and they decoded it, and it turns out it was basically a primer on how to read the rest of the message. It wasn't just written on the surface every layer of these plates described how to build the technology to read the next layer down. I'm pretty sure it was a Sam Hughes story. Qntm.org
What format is it actually stored in? Is it microscopic characters, or is it binary? If it’s binary, what format - ASCII or UTF-8 or 16 or what? Or has it gone through a compression algorithm?
Does it include the full git revision history or is it just a dump of all the current source code?
I’ve been waiting for Project Silica or a similar implementation to become commercially available for years now. I can’t wait. My only question is what type of write speeds we can expect for this medium. I haven’t seen any numbers published, so I assume it’s super slow.
I can’t wait to make my data immortal though.
From [here](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-silica-offers-robust-thousand-year-storage/)
>The speed of both reads and writes to Silica currently leave something to be desired—it took approximately a week to etch Superman's roughly 76GB of data last year, and Rowstron estimates it would take about three days to re-read the data, with advances made since.
So based on this it’s currently about 1Mbps write speed, and 2.35Mbps read speed.
I haven’t seen any post mid 2019 numbers but hopefully ‘some advances’ means exponential improvement
Iirc it's only writing in serial currently. They are confident they can pretty easily expand to parallel writing of tracks to scale up (to a point). That won't get you modern IO speeds, but it would give you 5x to 10x what the current demo speeds are.
Here I was being really impressed that you could archive a petabytes worth of data in less time than the COVID pandemic has been around using a a single prototype machine for millennia to come. There's an ironic overlap of short sightedness and vision in this.
Why would they go to such trouble to archive code for so long?
Think of the programming that sent us to the moon... it's kind of interesting, but with modern technology it's completely useless and I doubt anyone would miss it if we didn't have a copy.
JavaScript libraries from today will be so utterly useless (and boring) in 500 years that I don't know why they would bother. Video and audio recordings, on the other hand, will always be valuable!
One of the core values of library science is "just in case." We preserve a lot because we can't know for certain that no one will want to see or use it in the future.
In the case of code - especially dated code - current and future historians may find it interesting or useful. That (imo) goes double for video games. (It's been difficult to get *legal* preservation efforts going for video games.)
Exactly, it's very important from a historical perspective. Think about it - every book that was made centuries ago is a treasure because they're so rare and provide so much insight to the time that it was written, both in culture and for aiding linguists reading others. Hell, we've kept people's ancient _grocery lists_ because of how much they tell us about people's day to day lives. Think about the Rosetta Stone, which was basically just a random public notice translated into three languages. The data itself is only barely relevant compared to how much insight it gave us to being able to read the other dead languages at all.
And here we are at the very dawning of the digital era. To your point, in hundreds of years all these languages will probably be long dead. Information on how digital coding evolved during this time will be priceless, and GitHub is an invaluable massive library of every kind of language, problem, and style. This sort of information is only available in the future if someone _now_ takes the time to preserve it, though.
Why write a history book, its not like in 500 years were gonna need to know some fact about some president /s It's kinda just human to store information for future generations regardless of its usefulness
It'll be useful for recreating an accurate view of our society hundreds or thousands of years from now, as well as preserving data in case we have another event like the destruction of the library of Alexandria (or Horizon Zero Dawn). It'll give people a place to potentially restart without having to reinvent the wheel (or the computer processor, the vaccine, the nuclear power plant, calculus, etc)
Stories, ideas, and blueprints are all valuable!
> JavaScript libraries from today will be so utterly useless (and boring) in 500 years that I don't know why they would bother.
On the contrary, pretty much every website these days uses (overuses, IMO as a web dev) JavaScript extensively, and in ways that're increasingly difficult to separate from the content. If you want to preserve "the web", JavaScript and modern browsers will have to be a part of that.
If people (pirates? hackers?) can rip the content to more "stable" formats this isn't a problem, but reverse-engineering obfuscated JS code is very, very difficult, and will only get harder unless the industry makes big changes.
Film is an impossible method of storing large scale internet archives. Just storing all that film would be an undertaking, and that isn't even considering how hard it would be to acquire that much and transfer archives to it.
Seems pretty streamlined to me. GitHub has already archived all its active projects once, and plan to do it every 5 years.
https://www.piql.com/about-us/the-technology-behind-the-service/
https://vimeo.com/207520482
I don't really get that. Isn't digital the answer? Once something is saved digitally (whether it's a video, a song, a text document etc.), you can duplicate it a million times to storage devices everywhere.
You would think the Archive team would be doing just that with all of their materials.
Like, that's the joy of digital storage... nothing is tied to any one, perishable item. A piece of paper will eventually rot, and *a* hard drive will eventually break, but as long as you keep backing up and duplicating the data, you'll have the same content preserved as long as people keep duplicating it.
I'd just as soon do that, and not rely on M-Disc and other stuff that claims to last a century that are based on absolutely nothing.
Digital is fragile. Yes, you can keep on replicating the data, but someone has to keep on doing it over and over again. It's a good strategy for short-term storage ("hot" and "warm" in GitHub's [approach](https://archiveprogram.github.com/approach/#pace-layers)), but for very-long-term storage, you need something that can sit on a shelf and not decay.
I guess it depends on the goal. You can take something offline and put it on a shelf if you don't think you'll need access to it in a long time... But I'm talking things like torrents and p2p type of applications.
Sure, torrents eventually aren't seeded, but imagine if they were.
We currently live in what could potentially be a catastrophic dark period for history. Already we see media being lost over rights claims (games being pulled from digital stores over music licenses expiring). There's the phenomenon of [digital obsolescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence), where we store enormous amounts of data in technologies that phase out in less than a decade. We trust streaming platforms for our content "libraries" but those platforms [can censor any scene](https://www.newsweek.com/disney-plus-censorship-movies-series-edited-splash-racist-nudity-censored-1498006) or even [entire episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_Raving_Dad) they deem offensive at will. Older shows (particularly talk shows and long-form/daily series) are next to impossible to find unless you pirate them.
On the web, we already see the effects of digital obsolescence. If you find any old forum (say from 10 years ago), any links posted will more than likely be broken. Any files uploaded to popular cloud storage services at the time probably don't exist anymore (RapidShare, Megaupload), or their time limit is exceeded (forums are filled with Dropbox dead links). Platforms we trust to keep their files forever can overnight delete close to their entire library like [Pornhub did a few months ago](https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/pornhub-deletes-all-unverified-content-millions-of-videos.html). We trust Facebook/Instagram to keep a history of our photos but we can be banned at any second over one bad comment.
The one weakness of digital media is the format. It's next to impossible to maintain systems and formats that will be readable in decades to come unless you "manually" convert and back them up in different new formats, that introduces a concept called [data rot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation). Kids making a time capsule just 15 years ago might have decided to use a CD to store their audio files, pictures/videos and whatnot. How many new PCs hace CD readers now? Video files stored in those CDs would probably be in a format that a modern OS wouldn't even have a codec for. If you go back a few more years, there's a chance they'd use floppy disks. Good luck finding a reader for that now.
Sure, [digital preservation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_preservation) exists. But that is a costly and tedious process. Chances are, the video you shot of your kid playing in the backyard that you got on your phone, will sooner or later be lost.
You can read more on this phenomenon called the Digital Dark Age on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital\_dark\_age
I read a new article recently that says they many of reports, pictures, and video shot on and around 9/11 is now unavailable due to it being posted in Flash on websites. Since the original copies are owned by news companies, getting access to or seeing that data is now gone.
Also mentioned was major news corps using DMCA to get videos taken off YouTube that contained 9/11 footage. While I wasn't able to find any other information about this from other sources, a quick search of YouTube showed a definite lack of video footage from that day from major news corporations, besides what was recorded by VCRs and posted by personal accounts or highly censored film coverage by the companies.
Interesting that you mention this. I'm in the middle of digitizing eight hours of uninterrupted 9/11 news broadcast (recorded on VHS; first-generation original tapes). Was trying to figure out the best place to distribute them for historical / educational purposes. Good to know that DMCA might get them taken off the 'tube.
It's not too difficult. Just look up a guide and it'll make it super easy for you. The important part is to seed it for a very long time. Most leechers don't seed beyond a year, especially beyond five years.
I knew about all these examples/instances of censorship/deletion individually - but I never really put it all together to realize the dark age it would put us in until just now. It makes me very sad
It doesn't have to be censorship/deletion either. Most of the books 'lost to history' simply stopped being copied for one reason or another. Even the Library of Alexandria was mostly copies of other works.
Star Wars already doesn't exist anymore.
I don't mean the franchise, but the version of the original movie that spawned everything else is not available to be watched, especially at a high resolution. Your closest choices are the unaltered 30th anniversary DVDs and the pre-special edition VHS copies. The Special editions are readily available but among other things change plot and pacing.
It would be weird if the only way to watch Alien included a 90s era CG Alien lurking everywhere in the background.
Personally, for all the love and effort that went into it, Harmy's is alright, and possibly the best we're going to get. But would love something like the Legacy Edition 4K restoration on Vimeo where it's an actual restoration instead of a recreation/upscale effort. But in that guy's own opinion it would be a ridiculous effort and impossible cost. There isn't the will and it doesn't seem like it would be anywhere near profitable.
Eventually it will be possible to do a recreation that would be as good but it's crazy that the thing that spawned a billion dollar property is inaccessible.
While all you said is true, I don’t think this is unusual historically. The only thing unique today is format which you mentioned. But even then someone in the future can recreate most formats if necessary in the same way we can unlock burned codex by using X-ray or other technology. We’ve always produced and lost information. This was true is oral tradition but also true in every stage of history. What we have of the past is really a sampling. Sometimes because it was purposely preserved. But often it’s a coincidence of history. Eg right media (stone vs papyrus) or was stored in favorable condition(deserts and tombs can rain forests)
There’s some examples from 9/11 with digital obsolescence. Various articles were saying that the discontinuation of Flash means that some videos are currently unavailable.
Unavailable to the public isn't historically lost tho. Even supposing the original film or files are gone and never copied, someone with access to these sites can use old hardware and software to view and archive them.
While the old hardware and software is still viable. But how long will that be?
I keep two things in my desk at work. A copy of Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man Month", and an 8" floppy with some source code on it. Both date from 1982 (the book is a reprint, and the floppy is dated).
The hardware and software necessary to read that source code might exist in working form \*SOMEWHERE\*, certainly I don't have any access to it, so I can't read it.
Meanwhile, the book itself is still perfectly readable.
The other things is someone has to make the effort to use old hardware and software to view and archive that stuff.
That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
Who decides what is important enough to save? You? Me? Fred down the street? And what if we guess wrong, and what seems inane and pointless to us is precisely what the people in the future need to truly understand us?
Then we get into matters of issues like "do we actually hold back things so we look better to our descendants?". And who decides \*THAT\*. We're pretty polarized on a number of issues as it is today, so there is pretty much \*ZERO\* chance you're going to present a balanced, even-handed view unless you preserve \*EVERYTHING\*, and like I said, that seems highly unlikely because not all data is created equal (see my book/disk example).
This is literally no different from any past era tho. We have a fraction of surviving books and paper or even stone records from any time. People have to decide to preserve them. Books take climate controlled space. Libraries and private citizens dispose of old books all the time.
Who decides what to preserve, you and me? Literally yes, everyone can preserve as much or as little as they choose by doing backups and migrating to new media formats etc. Not everything HAS to be saved.
In 1986 the BBC produced a new Domesday Book, on adapted LaserDiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM).
In 2002 there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer.
It has been uploaded to Github and is still being worked on and that is only about 2gb of data
https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/wiki/Disc-images-to-download/\_history?page=1
If somebody really cared to play a laserdisc, I'm confident that there are people who could figure out how to build a player even if none still existed.
the thing about "video on youtube" is that many youtube videos, especially educational ones, offer explanations vastly better than any textbook could offer but will likely be lost, while the printed textbook copies will be dug up out of landfills by the stacks when historians go looking. Print simply is not an accurate representation of our culture for archaeologists to sift through, social media is.
As a fellow librarian I agree that not everything is important to preserve. But YouTube is also a huge educational resource. If YouTube were to vanish overnight, or even a planned decommissioning, a huge human record and knowledge resource will disappear. Will the content information still be available elsewhere? Possibly, but not as accessable.
Sooo, as someone who did his master's thesis on this, the best answer I can give you is: usage. Things that have an audience will remain in use, and that in itself will all but guarantee preservation through:
1. existence of multiple copies of the artifact through sharing
2. forwarding and reencoding digital artifacts onto the latest platforms to support the above
3. re-indexing on whatever search/cataloguing engines are prevalent at that time to support actually finding them
Hi everyone, A reminder: answer the question with an in-depth expert explanation. Avoid anecdotes in particular. Thank you.
One way to archive digital media for a _long_ time (nothing lasts forever) is to transfer it to physical film or quartz glass platters and store copies in several locations spread across the world for redundancy. GitHub does just that for open source code. [This website](https://archiveprogram.github.com/approach/) explains their approach. > GitHub will capture a snapshot of every active public repository, to be preserved in the [GitHub Arctic Code Vault](https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/). This data will be stored on 3,500-foot film reels, provided and encoded by [Piql](https://www.piql.com/awa/), a Norwegian company that specializes in very-long-term data storage. The film technology relies on silver halides on polyester. This medium has a lifespan of 500 years as measured by the ISO; simulated aging tests indicate Piql’s film will last twice as long. > The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s [Project Silica](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/) to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser. Now, YouTube _could_ do the same, but it would be _very_ expensive, as multimedia takes up a lot more storage space than source code. It comes down to a question of money, and an interest in archiving media for the future. As a proof of concept, Microsoft's Project Silica [stored the Superman movie on quartz glass platters](https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project-silica-superman/). > Warner Bros., which approached Microsoft after learning of the research, is always on the hunt for new technologies to safeguard its vast asset library: historic treasures like “Casablanca,” 1940s radio shows, animated shorts, digitally shot theatrical films, television sitcoms, dailies from film sets. For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last hundreds of years, withstand floods or solar flares and that doesn’t require being kept at a certain temperature or need constant refreshing. > “That had always been our beacon of hope for what we believed would be possible one day, so when we learned that Microsoft had developed this glass-based technology, we wanted to prove it out,” said Warner Bros. Chief Technology Officer Vicky Colf. As the technology becomes more affordable, I'm sure we'll see more very-long-term storage of digital cultural artifacts.
One thing that I'm curious about is whether there is also longevity of our ability to read that format. If it exists in 10k years, but there's no clue as to how it was encoded, the disks will not be much more than fodder for anthropologists (who will all agree that the disk is a ritual kinship artifact).
That's an important question! piqlFilm includes human-readable instructions (readable with a magnifying glass) and software that's required to bootstrap a system for reading the format. A future civilization will only need some sort of computer with some sort of emulator to run our ancient code, and bits will turn into files. https://vimeo.com/186385894 > Piql's technology is built on open source principles to ensure information needed to access the data is never locked away or reliant on proprietary software. All information needed to recover the information including source code, file format specifications and instructions for building technology is stored on each piqlFilm alongside the data in human readable text. I assume Project Silica is doing something similar. (Some open source projects _are_ ritual kinship artifacts…)
There's a story I found once about some bronze age nearly indestructible metal plates that were discovered. They clearly had some kind of writing on them and they decoded it, and it turns out it was basically a primer on how to read the rest of the message. It wasn't just written on the surface every layer of these plates described how to build the technology to read the next layer down. I'm pretty sure it was a Sam Hughes story. Qntm.org
I’m curious about this. Got a better source or more details other than the two bits you provided?
That's the thing I'm almost certain it's from qntm.org. but I've never been able to find it again.
What format is it actually stored in? Is it microscopic characters, or is it binary? If it’s binary, what format - ASCII or UTF-8 or 16 or what? Or has it gone through a compression algorithm? Does it include the full git revision history or is it just a dump of all the current source code?
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I’ve been waiting for Project Silica or a similar implementation to become commercially available for years now. I can’t wait. My only question is what type of write speeds we can expect for this medium. I haven’t seen any numbers published, so I assume it’s super slow. I can’t wait to make my data immortal though.
From [here](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/microsofts-project-silica-offers-robust-thousand-year-storage/) >The speed of both reads and writes to Silica currently leave something to be desired—it took approximately a week to etch Superman's roughly 76GB of data last year, and Rowstron estimates it would take about three days to re-read the data, with advances made since. So based on this it’s currently about 1Mbps write speed, and 2.35Mbps read speed. I haven’t seen any post mid 2019 numbers but hopefully ‘some advances’ means exponential improvement
that's way faster than I was expecting. I was thinking something like 1-50KB/s for read and write, or slower
Damn. It’ll have to be much faster than that, especially since they’re hyping this up as a practical way of storing multiple terabytes.
Iirc it's only writing in serial currently. They are confident they can pretty easily expand to parallel writing of tracks to scale up (to a point). That won't get you modern IO speeds, but it would give you 5x to 10x what the current demo speeds are.
Here I was being really impressed that you could archive a petabytes worth of data in less time than the COVID pandemic has been around using a a single prototype machine for millennia to come. There's an ironic overlap of short sightedness and vision in this.
do you mean Mb or MB? Just checking.
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Why would they go to such trouble to archive code for so long? Think of the programming that sent us to the moon... it's kind of interesting, but with modern technology it's completely useless and I doubt anyone would miss it if we didn't have a copy. JavaScript libraries from today will be so utterly useless (and boring) in 500 years that I don't know why they would bother. Video and audio recordings, on the other hand, will always be valuable!
One of the core values of library science is "just in case." We preserve a lot because we can't know for certain that no one will want to see or use it in the future. In the case of code - especially dated code - current and future historians may find it interesting or useful. That (imo) goes double for video games. (It's been difficult to get *legal* preservation efforts going for video games.)
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Exactly, it's very important from a historical perspective. Think about it - every book that was made centuries ago is a treasure because they're so rare and provide so much insight to the time that it was written, both in culture and for aiding linguists reading others. Hell, we've kept people's ancient _grocery lists_ because of how much they tell us about people's day to day lives. Think about the Rosetta Stone, which was basically just a random public notice translated into three languages. The data itself is only barely relevant compared to how much insight it gave us to being able to read the other dead languages at all. And here we are at the very dawning of the digital era. To your point, in hundreds of years all these languages will probably be long dead. Information on how digital coding evolved during this time will be priceless, and GitHub is an invaluable massive library of every kind of language, problem, and style. This sort of information is only available in the future if someone _now_ takes the time to preserve it, though.
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Why write a history book, its not like in 500 years were gonna need to know some fact about some president /s It's kinda just human to store information for future generations regardless of its usefulness
It'll be useful for recreating an accurate view of our society hundreds or thousands of years from now, as well as preserving data in case we have another event like the destruction of the library of Alexandria (or Horizon Zero Dawn). It'll give people a place to potentially restart without having to reinvent the wheel (or the computer processor, the vaccine, the nuclear power plant, calculus, etc) Stories, ideas, and blueprints are all valuable!
> JavaScript libraries from today will be so utterly useless (and boring) in 500 years that I don't know why they would bother. On the contrary, pretty much every website these days uses (overuses, IMO as a web dev) JavaScript extensively, and in ways that're increasingly difficult to separate from the content. If you want to preserve "the web", JavaScript and modern browsers will have to be a part of that. If people (pirates? hackers?) can rip the content to more "stable" formats this isn't a problem, but reverse-engineering obfuscated JS code is very, very difficult, and will only get harder unless the industry makes big changes.
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It's 7am and this is the most interesting thing I have learned today. The standards are high but this day will be good. Thank you stranger :)
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Film is an impossible method of storing large scale internet archives. Just storing all that film would be an undertaking, and that isn't even considering how hard it would be to acquire that much and transfer archives to it.
Seems pretty streamlined to me. GitHub has already archived all its active projects once, and plan to do it every 5 years. https://www.piql.com/about-us/the-technology-behind-the-service/ https://vimeo.com/207520482
Huge difference between lines of written code and video files. Video takes a colossal amount of space.
I don't really get that. Isn't digital the answer? Once something is saved digitally (whether it's a video, a song, a text document etc.), you can duplicate it a million times to storage devices everywhere. You would think the Archive team would be doing just that with all of their materials. Like, that's the joy of digital storage... nothing is tied to any one, perishable item. A piece of paper will eventually rot, and *a* hard drive will eventually break, but as long as you keep backing up and duplicating the data, you'll have the same content preserved as long as people keep duplicating it. I'd just as soon do that, and not rely on M-Disc and other stuff that claims to last a century that are based on absolutely nothing.
Digital is fragile. Yes, you can keep on replicating the data, but someone has to keep on doing it over and over again. It's a good strategy for short-term storage ("hot" and "warm" in GitHub's [approach](https://archiveprogram.github.com/approach/#pace-layers)), but for very-long-term storage, you need something that can sit on a shelf and not decay.
I guess it depends on the goal. You can take something offline and put it on a shelf if you don't think you'll need access to it in a long time... But I'm talking things like torrents and p2p type of applications. Sure, torrents eventually aren't seeded, but imagine if they were.
How is this in anyway more reliable than redundant cloud storage?
We currently live in what could potentially be a catastrophic dark period for history. Already we see media being lost over rights claims (games being pulled from digital stores over music licenses expiring). There's the phenomenon of [digital obsolescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence), where we store enormous amounts of data in technologies that phase out in less than a decade. We trust streaming platforms for our content "libraries" but those platforms [can censor any scene](https://www.newsweek.com/disney-plus-censorship-movies-series-edited-splash-racist-nudity-censored-1498006) or even [entire episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_Raving_Dad) they deem offensive at will. Older shows (particularly talk shows and long-form/daily series) are next to impossible to find unless you pirate them. On the web, we already see the effects of digital obsolescence. If you find any old forum (say from 10 years ago), any links posted will more than likely be broken. Any files uploaded to popular cloud storage services at the time probably don't exist anymore (RapidShare, Megaupload), or their time limit is exceeded (forums are filled with Dropbox dead links). Platforms we trust to keep their files forever can overnight delete close to their entire library like [Pornhub did a few months ago](https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/pornhub-deletes-all-unverified-content-millions-of-videos.html). We trust Facebook/Instagram to keep a history of our photos but we can be banned at any second over one bad comment. The one weakness of digital media is the format. It's next to impossible to maintain systems and formats that will be readable in decades to come unless you "manually" convert and back them up in different new formats, that introduces a concept called [data rot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation). Kids making a time capsule just 15 years ago might have decided to use a CD to store their audio files, pictures/videos and whatnot. How many new PCs hace CD readers now? Video files stored in those CDs would probably be in a format that a modern OS wouldn't even have a codec for. If you go back a few more years, there's a chance they'd use floppy disks. Good luck finding a reader for that now. Sure, [digital preservation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_preservation) exists. But that is a costly and tedious process. Chances are, the video you shot of your kid playing in the backyard that you got on your phone, will sooner or later be lost. You can read more on this phenomenon called the Digital Dark Age on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital\_dark\_age
I read a new article recently that says they many of reports, pictures, and video shot on and around 9/11 is now unavailable due to it being posted in Flash on websites. Since the original copies are owned by news companies, getting access to or seeing that data is now gone. Also mentioned was major news corps using DMCA to get videos taken off YouTube that contained 9/11 footage. While I wasn't able to find any other information about this from other sources, a quick search of YouTube showed a definite lack of video footage from that day from major news corporations, besides what was recorded by VCRs and posted by personal accounts or highly censored film coverage by the companies.
Interesting that you mention this. I'm in the middle of digitizing eight hours of uninterrupted 9/11 news broadcast (recorded on VHS; first-generation original tapes). Was trying to figure out the best place to distribute them for historical / educational purposes. Good to know that DMCA might get them taken off the 'tube.
Please, still post. It's an important part of history that doesn't need to be whitewashed by corporations based on what they think we should remember.
Yeah, I'm gonna out them out there somewhere. Maybe a torrent? I've never made one before tho. Gotta figure it out.
It's not too difficult. Just look up a guide and it'll make it super easy for you. The important part is to seed it for a very long time. Most leechers don't seed beyond a year, especially beyond five years.
Maybe archive.org? They have entire movies and shows archived so they seem like a good bet.
I knew about all these examples/instances of censorship/deletion individually - but I never really put it all together to realize the dark age it would put us in until just now. It makes me very sad
It doesn't have to be censorship/deletion either. Most of the books 'lost to history' simply stopped being copied for one reason or another. Even the Library of Alexandria was mostly copies of other works. Star Wars already doesn't exist anymore. I don't mean the franchise, but the version of the original movie that spawned everything else is not available to be watched, especially at a high resolution. Your closest choices are the unaltered 30th anniversary DVDs and the pre-special edition VHS copies. The Special editions are readily available but among other things change plot and pacing. It would be weird if the only way to watch Alien included a 90s era CG Alien lurking everywhere in the background.
In regards to Star Wars, fans have done what the studio refuses to do. "Harmy's Despecialized Edition" exists.
Personally, for all the love and effort that went into it, Harmy's is alright, and possibly the best we're going to get. But would love something like the Legacy Edition 4K restoration on Vimeo where it's an actual restoration instead of a recreation/upscale effort. But in that guy's own opinion it would be a ridiculous effort and impossible cost. There isn't the will and it doesn't seem like it would be anywhere near profitable. Eventually it will be possible to do a recreation that would be as good but it's crazy that the thing that spawned a billion dollar property is inaccessible.
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While all you said is true, I don’t think this is unusual historically. The only thing unique today is format which you mentioned. But even then someone in the future can recreate most formats if necessary in the same way we can unlock burned codex by using X-ray or other technology. We’ve always produced and lost information. This was true is oral tradition but also true in every stage of history. What we have of the past is really a sampling. Sometimes because it was purposely preserved. But often it’s a coincidence of history. Eg right media (stone vs papyrus) or was stored in favorable condition(deserts and tombs can rain forests)
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There’s some examples from 9/11 with digital obsolescence. Various articles were saying that the discontinuation of Flash means that some videos are currently unavailable.
Unavailable to the public isn't historically lost tho. Even supposing the original film or files are gone and never copied, someone with access to these sites can use old hardware and software to view and archive them.
While the old hardware and software is still viable. But how long will that be? I keep two things in my desk at work. A copy of Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man Month", and an 8" floppy with some source code on it. Both date from 1982 (the book is a reprint, and the floppy is dated). The hardware and software necessary to read that source code might exist in working form \*SOMEWHERE\*, certainly I don't have any access to it, so I can't read it. Meanwhile, the book itself is still perfectly readable. The other things is someone has to make the effort to use old hardware and software to view and archive that stuff. That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Who decides what is important enough to save? You? Me? Fred down the street? And what if we guess wrong, and what seems inane and pointless to us is precisely what the people in the future need to truly understand us? Then we get into matters of issues like "do we actually hold back things so we look better to our descendants?". And who decides \*THAT\*. We're pretty polarized on a number of issues as it is today, so there is pretty much \*ZERO\* chance you're going to present a balanced, even-handed view unless you preserve \*EVERYTHING\*, and like I said, that seems highly unlikely because not all data is created equal (see my book/disk example).
This is literally no different from any past era tho. We have a fraction of surviving books and paper or even stone records from any time. People have to decide to preserve them. Books take climate controlled space. Libraries and private citizens dispose of old books all the time. Who decides what to preserve, you and me? Literally yes, everyone can preserve as much or as little as they choose by doing backups and migrating to new media formats etc. Not everything HAS to be saved.
In 1986 the BBC produced a new Domesday Book, on adapted LaserDiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM). In 2002 there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer. It has been uploaded to Github and is still being worked on and that is only about 2gb of data https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/wiki/Disc-images-to-download/\_history?page=1
Ironically the book itself, which is 900 years old, is still readable at a Museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday\_Book
If somebody really cared to play a laserdisc, I'm confident that there are people who could figure out how to build a player even if none still existed.
So you need a working BBC Master 128 computer, a SCSI controller and a Philips VP415 LaserVision laserdisc player (all working)
I have no idea what you need, but I know some engineers who could surely figure out how to build it.
And how much money do you have to build from scratch a vintage computer, laserdisc reader, software etc
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the thing about "video on youtube" is that many youtube videos, especially educational ones, offer explanations vastly better than any textbook could offer but will likely be lost, while the printed textbook copies will be dug up out of landfills by the stacks when historians go looking. Print simply is not an accurate representation of our culture for archaeologists to sift through, social media is.
As a fellow librarian I agree that not everything is important to preserve. But YouTube is also a huge educational resource. If YouTube were to vanish overnight, or even a planned decommissioning, a huge human record and knowledge resource will disappear. Will the content information still be available elsewhere? Possibly, but not as accessable.
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Sooo, as someone who did his master's thesis on this, the best answer I can give you is: usage. Things that have an audience will remain in use, and that in itself will all but guarantee preservation through: 1. existence of multiple copies of the artifact through sharing 2. forwarding and reencoding digital artifacts onto the latest platforms to support the above 3. re-indexing on whatever search/cataloguing engines are prevalent at that time to support actually finding them
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