By Marcia Stepanek in New York and first published in Business Week.
Up to 20% of the information carefully collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers
during NASA’S 1976 Viking mission to Mars has been lost.
Some POW and MIA records and casualty counts from the Vietnam War, stored on Defence
Dept. Computers, can no longer be read and at Pennsylvania State University, all but 14 of
some 3,000 computer files containing student records and school history are no longer
accessible because of missing or outmoded software.
What’s going on?
The world is in a headlong rush to go digital. From Tokyo to Tampa, schools, libraries,
factories and churches are forking over great sums to computerise everything from
Johnny’s latest math scores to Aunt Hattie’s dental records. Computers are
supposed to help us manage this information explosion by storing oceans of data that, at
some later date, can be recalled at the click of a mouse.
Trouble is, all these bits of information are piling up so fast that hardly anybody is
thinking about saving them. By 2000, Forrester Research Inc. estimates, one of every three
Americans will be online. What’s more, half to three-quarters of the data produced
each day will be "born digital"- that is, it will never have existed on paper.
Says Eric Almasey, a digital expert at Mercer Management Consulting: "We’re not
just doubling amounts of electronic data every six months, we’re quadrupling
it."
The Information Age is creating a digital dilemma. For years, computer scientists told
us that digital 1s and 0s could last forever. But now, we’re discovering that the
media we’re using to carry our precious information on into the future are turning
out to be far from eternal – so fragile, in fact, that some might not last through
the decade.
More is at risk than government and corporate records. The danger extends to cultural
legacies: new music, early drafts of literature, and academic works originate in digital
form without hard copies.
Houston calling
To be sure, all our information is not in jeopardy. There are some solutions, even new
software to back up data on special paper disks. But there’s no quick fix. The data
lost from the Viking Mars mission, for example, was trapped on decaying digital magnetic
tape, forcing NASA to call missions specialists out of retirement to help the agency
reconstruct key data. "Digital information lasts forever, or five years –
whichever comes first," says Jeff Rothenberg, senior computer scientist at RAND Corp.
Forget forever
Under less-than optimal storage conditions, digital tapes and disks, including CD-ROMs
and optical drives, might deteriorate about as fast as newsprint – in 5 to 10 years.
Tests by the National Media Lab, a St. Paul (Minn.) – based government and industry
consortium, show that tapes might preserve data for a decade, depending on storage
conditions. Disks – whether CD-ROMs used for games or the type used by some companies
to store pension plans – may become unreadable in five years.
For consumers, the biggest worry is CD-ROMs. Unlike paper records, CD-ROMs often
don’t show decay until it’s too late. Experts are just beginning to realise that
stray magnetic fields, oxidation, humidity and material decay can quickly erase the
information stored on them. Says Robert Stein, founder of New York based Voyager Co.,
which makes commercial CD-ROM books and games: "CDs have a tendency to degrade much
faster than anybody (at least in the companies that make them), is willing to
predict." Stein doesn’t expect the CD-ROMs that Voyager sells, to last for more
than 5 or 10 years, and neither, he says, should customers.
There’s another problem: the unrelenting pace of technology. Chances are good that
the software needed to get at much of today’s data might not be readily available in
10 years. Anyone who has tried wrestling information from a 5¼" floppy disk knows
that. Just ask scientists conducting rain forest research. Satellite photos of the Amazon
Basin taken in the 1970s – data critical to establishing deforestation trends –
are trapped on indecipherable magnetic tapes no longer on the market. But even keeping a
step ahead of data decay and software obsolescence is no guarantee of escaping the
problem. Companies spending heavily on sophisticated new computers and software to beat
the technology reaper say they’re beginning to run into a whole new problem. All too
often, when they transfer information from one aging media or computer system to a newer
one, not all bits make the migration. Sometimes, just a footnote or spread sheet is lost.
Other times, whole categories of data evaporate. Says Rothenberg "It’s like
playing the child’s game of Telephone (Chinese whispers). It doesn’t take
many translations from one media to an other before you have lost significant aspects of
the original data."
The Food & Drug Administration reports that some pharmaceutical companies are
discovering errors as they copy drug-testing data that back up claims of long-term product
safety and effectiveness. In several recent cases involving data transfers from Unix
computers to systems running Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system, blood-pressure
numbers were randomly off by up to eight digits from those in original records, FDA and
company data specialists report.
Sophisticated software can catch most of the errors, but "not all of the
time," says Rone Lewis, vice-president of business development of Surety
Technologies, a data recovery and migration firm. Some companies fear the problem could
expose them to lawsuits. "In our litigation-prone age, it’s harder to defend
yourself if you’re losing parts of your records when you migrate them," says
Henry Perritt, dean of Chicago Kent College of Law.
What to do? Some government agencies have a solution – of sorts. The National
Archives requires technical documentation about how the records being submitted were
created. And federal regulators, including the Securities & Exchange Commission,
won’t take digital filings from companies they oversee, unless they are sent in
plain-vanilla computer formats. "Otherwise, you start getting file formats that
nobody is going to be able to read in 20 years," says Bill Combs, the SEC’s
computer expert.
Some technology managers are urging companies to make preservation more of a priority
when buying new computer systems. Ellen Knapp, chief knowledge officer with Coopers &
Lybrand, says companies need to give infotech managers more input so that incompatible
systems don’t compound the migration problem. "Some companies have shorter
visions when purchasing new technology," she says, "and end up having more
compatibility problems migrating data as a result."
Ray Paddock, a director for Storage Technology Corp., says the problem is so bad for
some of his clients that they’re creating new databases just to decipher the data
they have on tapes and disks. Others, he says, are simply keeping the old version of the
software used to create documents.
No Standards
Meanwhile, the government is looking into establishing durability standards for digital
media. A task force – including representatives of Eastman Kodak, IBM, and archivists
at leading museums and universities – has agreed on a digital longevity test
ultimately aimed at increasing the life span of CD-ROMs and other types of digital media.
The only problem: so far, no manufacturer has tested its products using the age-test
created by the task force. And the group is still working on a standard for magnetic tape.
Others are at work on new technologies to solve the problem. NORSAM Technologies in Los
Alamos N.M., for example, is promoting its HD-Rosetta project which permanently stores
historical documents – but only if they are converted from digital back to analog
recording formats.
But at least one remedy being offered by researchers sounds a lot more like the distant
past than the future: Cobblestone Software Inc. in Lexington, Mass., is promoting
PaperDisk, which uses paper to print out complex patterns of dots and dashes representing
digitised files. Cobblestone President Tom Antognini claims it should last for centuries
– or about as long as old-fashioned, high quality paper.
He didn’t want to wake anyone when he entered his house so he took off his shoes
and started tiptoeing up the staircase.
Halfway up the flight, he fell over backwards and landed flat on his rear end.
That wouldn’t have been so bad except he had a couple of empty pint bottles in his
back pocket and they broke. The broken glass carved up his buttocks terribly, but he was
so drunk that he didn’t feel any pain.
A few minutes later as he was undressing he noticed the blood, so he checked himself in
the mirror and sure enough, his behind was badly cut. He patched up the damage as best as
he could under the circumstances and collapsed into bed.
The next morning, with his head throbbing and his rear in agony he stayed hunkered
under the covers, trying to think up a good story. Then his wife came into the bedroom.
"Well, you really tied one on last night," she said. "Where’d you
go?"
"A couple of beers? That’s a laugh," she replied. "You got
plastered last night. Where on earth did you get to?"
"Why are you so sure I got drunk last night?" he asked.
"My first clue," she replied, "was when I got up this morning and found
a bunch of bandaids stuck to the mirror."
The second issue for Volume 4 we will continue with part six of the article on the
Dynamics of Cost of Image Capture.
In the next few issues we will have some new articles which will include the following:
