Twilight

I went out to The Albert the other night to see Twilight Hotel play. There were really good, so after the show I bought their CD, When The Wolves Go Blind.

It was only when I got home that I realised that I had no device that could play Compact Discs. I play all my music on my iPod or iPhone connected to a speaker dock. And my computer is a Macbook Air …no disc drive. So I had to bring the CD into work with me, stick into my iMac and rip the songs from there.

It’s funny how format (or storage medium) obsolescence creeps up on you like that. I wonder how long it will be until I’m not using any kind of magnetic medium at all.

Century-Scale Storage

This magnificent piece by Maxwell Neely-Cohen—with some tasteful art-direction—is right up my alley!

This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age | MIT Technology Review

For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.

Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age - Long Now

A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.

Safeguarding music | Global Music Vault | Svalbard

This sounds like an interesting long-term storage project, but colour me extremely sceptical of their hand-wavey vagueness around their supposedly flawless technical solution:

This technology will be revealed to the world in the near future.

Also, they keep hyping up the Svalbard location as though it were purpose-built for this project, rather than the global seed bank (which they don’t even mention).

This might be a good way to do marketing, but it’s a shitty way to go about digital preservation.

Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape - IEEE Spectrum

It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.