Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die
By Bryan Bergeron
306 pp.
I’d been avoiding reading Bryan Bergeron’s Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die because of the book’s doom-and-gloom blurb claiming that it described how “our data is at far greater risk than we’ve ever imagined — and envisions a frightening future, where so much critical information is lost that civilization itself could collapse.” Digital data loss is a problem, but a potential civilization killer?
But then I read an excerpt of the book on a web site and decided to give it a shot. I should have stuck with my original impressions — it turned out the short excerpt I read online was the only part of the book I found worthwhile.
Which does not necessarily mean that others might not find it worthwhile. The main problem with the book is that about 80 percent of the text is concerned with a simple, but thorough, look at various schemes that large corporations and other entities use to manage their data. Readers who do not already know about data warehousing and the benefits and drawbacks of Network Attached Storage vs. Storage Area Networks might find such a review of interest, but more technically astute readers will find this largely repetitive and redundant.
Which might not be so bad if Bergeron was able to deliver on his fears that contemporary civilization might be brought down with one fell swoop from data loss. Bergeron, unfortunately, does not even come close to this.
He opens his book with a nice history of data loss throughout the ages and how (some) data have been preserved despite traditional methods of destruction such as the burning of paper records and books. Bergeron also offers a nice summary of just how much more difficult it is to preserve data in the digital age over a long period of time. Hardware and software changes so quickly these days, that a method of data storage that was widespread 10 years ago might be impossible to read today (as is the case with data stored on 5 1/4″ floppy disks, for example).
Nowhere, though, does Bergeron make a serious argument that civilization might be in danger from a failure to properly archive data (though he presents a few horror stories that make it clear that corporations who fail to give this their attention could be in serious trouble in the event of a hardware/software failure).
That oversight is odd considering that it is not inconceivable that civilization could be endangered by a more intentional data loss. A few well placed electromagnetic pulse devices, for example, might achieve much the same result that more conventional means achieved during the various burnings and raids on the Alexandrian Library and other information repositories.
Neither does Bergeron address the issue of copy protection, which threatens to add another layer of problems. I experienced this first hand, having used a word processor for the Apple II in the early 1980s that copy-protected its data disks. Getting that data into a usable form in the early 1990s was made extremely difficult thanks to the copy protection scheme. With efforts to copy protect media files and even build copy protection into all computer hardware. That trend could make it extremely difficult to archive the past, but is an issue not really addressed in Dark Ages II.
Bergeron’s book might serve as a basic introduction to digital archiving, but for more technically astute readers, the book never gets beyond skimming the surface.