Future Proof

I have hundreds of Gigs of information stored, and backed up, on multiple hard drives, as well as DVD’s. There are photos, documents, and a massive collection of Movies and TV shows that, until a few weeks ago, I was fairly certain were covered. My data was safe.

Then it dawned on me, as I read the news that HD-DVD was officially dead: formats change, constantly. HD-DVD is barely a few years old, but if I had backed up everything on HD-DVD (assuming there’d been commercially available burners) I would now be forced to migrate everything to another format to ensure future-compatibility. Ask anyone with a Beta tape of his or her kids birth, how difficult it can be to hunt down a Betamax player in 2008.

Nearly every format that I can back-up to today has absolutely zero guarantees of being readable in 10 years. This isn’t a problem if I’m constantly engaged with my data, if  it travels with me. I have photos that I originally took with a Sony Mavica in 1998 that used floppy discs, which now live happily on my 300gb external HD. But if I “found” one of those floppies today, I’d have to scramble to buy a usb floppy disc drive in order to access that data.  Somewhere, I still have an old 100mb ZIP disk with porn that is equally inaccessible.

In stark contrast, a recently unearthed family album, that sat abandoned in the house that belonged to my later grandmother, was perfectly accessible. It was in remarkably good shape and required no apparatus to interface with the information contained in each photograph, except my eyeballs. Whilst I’ve enjoyed the fact that paper is no longer wasted on things like manuals and bills, I have to voice my support for it as a magnificent future-proof backup.  Photos, Emails, Documents, Articles, Web Pages (to an extent) can all be archived on paper which you can stick in a safe deposit box and be fairly certain that you’re grandchildren will have no trouble accessing the information’s stored there.