Digital time bomb waiting to go off

We live in a digital age and almost all of us are using computers for work and for play.

Depending on the nature of the play, many digital dilemmas relate to the world of work, but not all of them, particularly where photographs are concerned.

With this in mind, although the bias of this piece is toward the working world and in particular large collections of data, please don’t dismiss its relevance to computer play if it involves anything that you have created or want to save, writes Amanda Davey.

As background, I was in charge of a computer network in a practice of landscape architects running six offices across the British Isles for ten years. I still keep an eye on the market, contribute to discussion on the Landscape Institute archive and of course use my own computing system, but focus my attention on fieldwork, research and taking photographs. Not as lucrative, but more fresh air.

Computers have been part of my world since taking a BBC touch-typing 1-hour session in a trailer in Warwick marketplace in 1984. The speed of change has been on occasions awesome to watch, but it has been a very interesting period to live through.

Computer 'graphics' really started to get competitive with hand-drawn work in the late 1980s, with the advent of the Apple Mac and its ability to draw lines of variable thickness and print to a laser printer (mostly black and white).

I know that there were other methods involving Ataris and other desktop computers, let alone the incredible feats of mathematical modelling that mainframe computers used to undertake. What I am trying to do is to locate a time back to which we need to be very aware and it is my belief that it should be the mid to late 1980s, not later as many try to argue.

Since the advent of graphics that could compete with the pen and the pencil there has been an increase in uptake for creative work that has been patchy, but crucial. A bit like the uptake of digital cameras, that time when it was possible to really produce something credible was the key.

These were the early, heady days of Microsoft and the personal computer. The birth of AutoCAD in 1982, Adobe Photoshop in 1990 and other tools and gadgets that are now important elements in our world, led to a rapid uptake in engineering and architecture driven work, where scheme changes on very subtle levels could be accommodated in a flash, rather than require copious scratching out of film or tracing paper and lots of glue.

Then computers started to show how man-made they were and hours of work could disappear in a flash as they crashed or as hard drives failed. Backup became a buzzword. It is still a very crucial mantra for all users of digital material.

Early backups went on to floppy disk (impressively large at 1.44MB when their use started to falter), onto zip drives, tape, CDs, then onto servers and much later onto DVD. To go with this myriad, and not exhaustive list, was a range of software designed to make running the backups easy to manage.

Some of this software was expensive, implying longevity of the supplier. Some was cheaper and the suppliers often found these packages hard to sustain. Servers were built on digital platforms designed to function using particular code.

All of this is now under very serious threat. Microsoft has gone to new operating systems that cannot run even fairly recent software. Server software that at one time was virtually ubiquitous has been cast to one side in favour of open source options that mean finding a platform to open old files on is getting increasingly hard.

The embedded nature of much of the sophisticated backup software encrypted the data and this is often very hard to replicate on different and newer hardware. Apart from the laser technology of CDs and DVDs, almost all other backups were done on magnetic media, which is vulnerable to the proximity of mobile phones, heat, extreme cold, etc, so while being capable of copying much more data they are also very vulnerable. The ability to handle a lot of data is also a different problem, because so much information is kept regardless of its worth.

There is a digital time bomb that is ticking very loudly, but in a sound-proof box. A bit like the old Mission Impossible TV programmes, this material is going to spontaneously destroy itself.

Many archives of all sizes are aware to a degree that looking after our current data for the future is going to be important, but very few have joined up the dots and come to the realisation that an entire generation’s work is likely to be at very real risk already.

What makes it even harder to quantify, is that as yet many of the designs and images that have been lost have been early work done by people who have yet to become significant figures. By the time they have become recognised 'names' it will be too late for much of their work to still be available.

Many people are lobbying for old material, the pre-computer era material, to be digitised as a matter of urgency. While of course I support that, of far greater and more profound urgency is the need to address that body of work from the early digital era that is at so much risk and the danger that so much may well have gone already needs to be given due notice and emphasis on protecting what can be retained is given where it is needed, by individuals as well as by institutions.

Comments

[Stuart Heard]

An interesting article. Would like to know more about the problems that are related to Microsoft and software and your thoughts on the new storage devices SSD which are slowing increasing in size.

[Amanda Davey]

Sorry to be slow to respond, I have been away in Iceland. The main concern that I was expressing in this was the very real problem that digital files dating between 1985 and now will have in the future if they aren't looked at closely now. Backup systems have come and gone, new operating systems, such as Windows 7 and the wonders of Vista ;) have trampled on the chances of some of the older software running on modern machinery. Databases suffer enormously from this problem, but there are other softwares that had limited export capability and the products from them are also likely to be at risk. My own experience with Novell Netware and Cheyenne Arcserve is very far from unique in a server environment. As far as modern backup systems are concerned, then I would always look at media that have higher capacity, but with an eye on their viability. I heard at the weekend of a DVD compatible media that is due out that uses different writing technology, which might mean a life of approximately 1,000 years, which would be very good news in archival terms apart from the limited capacity of 4GB or 8 if doubled. We need to look at being able to access the data, but far more importantly we need to be able to READ it!