Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Dana Myers <dana.myers@...> wrote:
>
> On 11/20/2011 2:11 PM, Dick Rawson wrote:

> So far, we've had CD -> DVD -> SACD -> Blu-Ray that are physical super-sets of each
> preceding generation.  This isn't like a 3.5" floppy disk.  A new BD drive reads old CDs.
> 
> Dana

I don't have a crystal ball, but my guess is any kind of spinning disk technology will disappear in the next 10-20 years. People will have a window of time to migrate digital data from these technologies to newer ones. Thus, having very durable media is certainly valuable in terms of safeguarding digital data for the short and medium term, but doesn't solve the long term digital preservation issues.

I'm not a pessimist by any means about electronic data preservation, but the key strategies are 1) avoid obscure formats, 2) reformat whenever you see a looming file format obsolescence issue creeping into your digital collection 3), migrate data before hardware quits working and cannot easily be purchased, and 4) backup, backup, backup! All very time consuming, which means many digital files are destined to vanish. The digital age has, IMHO, made preservation practice more challenging, not less. Even the sheer volume of information that humans would have to painstakingly catalog in order to preserve has jumped enormously.

One other point:  the digital information age has brought us the notion of "perfect" copies with no data integrity loss ever, but In practice, we're not there yet. Still too many important image and video file formats that rely on lossy compression.  Migrating/converting from one format to another "newer" format without further lossy compression is much easier said than done in this era. People have to pay attention, and many don't realize there's even an issue there.  As a colleague of mine once said: "Confidence is what you have until you know the full extent of the problem"!
 
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com