First heard about Millenniata’s M-Arc archival DVD system when the Long Now blog mentioned that the product was actually shipping. Millenniata claims its M-Arc DVDs are backwards-compatible with existing DVD technologies, but rather than using a laser to heat up a photosensitive dye, the M-Arc uses a mechanical process to make scratches in a physical…
Tag archives for Data Preservation
Back in March, the Long Now Foundation blog featured an extremely long post republishing two articles and a paper concerned with the potential loss of data caused by the increasing speed at which storage technologies become obsolete and, soon thereafter, difficult to access. Of the three pieces, Jennifer Stilles’s look at the National Archives’ efforts…
I couldn’t agree more with Jason Scott’s essay, Fuck the Cloud — if you are entrusting important data to a service that you don’t control and don’t have a migration path out, you are a fool. Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your…
Henry Newman has a basic overview of the issues with data preservation in an increasingly all-digital world, but the title of his essay — Rock Don’t Need to Be Backed Up — gives me the hives, because it is transparently wrong. Newman opens his essay by explaining the origins of the title he chose, My…
I’m a big fan of online backup of critical data — I use Amazon S3 to back up the 300gb or so of personal files I couldn’t bear to lose — but as these sort of sites proliferate, you have to be careful to pick one that’s going to be around for awhile. Case in…
Personally, this is why I run my own web services using open source packages rather than trust free services for long-term storage of information (short-term usage is inevitable, but get that stuff off and onto a server you control and ensure it can be backed up ASAP). The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of…