Forget Paper. Forget Hard Drives. Forget CD and DVD Disks. Forget
Most Everything Else. For Long-Term preservation, Use a Piece of Glass.
Genealogists
frequently discuss the best ways to preserve family tree information so
that it can be read and perhaps updated by future generations. Some
people plan to save everything on paper so that “it won’t become
obsolete.” Of course, they forget that paper is probably the most
fragile storage medium of all, easily destroyed by water, humidity,
acids in the paper, fire, insects, and a variety of other dangers.
Probably the greatest threat to data storage on paper is simply
fading ink. Most paper prepared with today’s paper and today’s inks will
be unreadable within a century, perhaps much less time than that.
Floppy disks were the storage medium of choice for some number of
years ago but have since fallen into disfavor. The magnetic information
of floppy disks doesn’t last forever. Even worse, floppy disk drives are
rapidly disappearing. Most of us doubt that there will be any floppy
disk drives available to read the disks within the next decade or two.
A better(?) solution is to record the information on CD-ROM or
DVD-ROM disks but that has similar problems. These plastic disks also do
not last forever, especially those that are recorded individually on
today’s computers.
Several newer technologies hold a lot of promise but are not yet in
widespread use. One that looks especially promising is a new storage
medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data — the
type of data you likely won’t need to access for months, years, or even
decades. It’s data that doesn’t need to sit on a server, ready to be
used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could
corrupt it.
The new technology is called
“Project Silica.”
A piece of silica glass measuring 7.5 centimeters (3 inches) by 7.5
centimeters (3 inches) by 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) can store at least
75.6 gigabytes of data, photographs, music, or even high-resolution
videos.
The movie industry has many thousands of films that need preservation
but also keep bumping up the limitations of today’s storage methods as
do genealogists. For instance, the Warner Brothers studio has been
safekeeping original celluloid film reels starting in the 1920s, audio
from 1940s radio shows and much more, for decades. Think about classics
like “Casablanca,” “The Wizard of Oz” or “Looney Tunes” cartoons: how
can they be preserved?
Together,
Warner Brothers and Microsoft have developed a solution to preserve
those original assets in perpetuity. The new technology is first being
used to store a copy of the 1978 movie “Superman” on a small glass disc
about the size of a coaster. If successful, the same technology should
be useful for storing family history information as well as for
thousands of other uses.
You can read more about this technology in an article by Janko Roettgers in the
Variety web site at:
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/project-silica-superman-warner-bros-microsoft-1203390459/.
Of course, two present limitations might remain even in the future:
1. Will any devices capable of reading “Project Silica” glass still be available a few thousand years from now?
2. Will anyone a few thousand years from now have any interest in a very old “Superman” movie or even Looney Tunes?
My thanks to newsletter reader Pierre Clouthier for telling me about this latest technology.
4 Comments
—> And when the glass breaks?
Exactly the same thing as happens when a hard drive fails or a
magnetic disk loses magnetism or a piece of paper is damaged or
destroyed by any number of problems: it becomes useless.
That is the reason why I have written many times about the reason you want to
ALWAYS
create two (or preferably more than two) copies of everything that is
important to you and then store them in two (or preferably more than
two) locations. In fact, I store my important files in three or four
locations and I wouldn’t be surprised if some people store things in ten
or more locations. Those widely-separated multiple copies won’t all go
bad at once if you have a good backup plan.
Regardless of the storage media used, every manager of every
significant data center never depends upon only one copy of anything
that is important. Individual consumers can learn a lot from data center
managers.
L.O.C.K.S.S. – “Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe”
See
https://duckduckgo.com/?ratb=c&q=site%3Aeogn.com+%22L.O.C.K.S.S.%22&t=brave&ia=web for a list of my past articles that mention the need for L.O.C.K.S.S. – “Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe”.
A
recent research report by Genealogy Online shows that genealogists have
a high risk of losing (parts of) their genealogical data when
transferring a GEDCOM file from their family tree program or service to
another family tree program or service. This is caused by the fact that
most family tree programs and services do not follow the GEDCOM
specification to the letter and because a lot of undocumented
“user-defined tags” are used.
Informations from FamilySearch (by asking about 5.5.5):
“The Church of Jesus Christ has the copyright on the Gedcom Specification since 1987. There has not been a legal transfer of the rights we have to the Gedcom Specification.”
So 5.5.5 is not a legal GEDCOM version.