Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Nov 2008 09:13 UTC, submitted by irbis
What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer's hard drive? The concern for archivists and information scientists is that, with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
It may be solvable on a personal level if you stick to it, but not in general. Where are you going to find legacy applications in the future? Or even guarantee there is a virtual machine to run them?
Anyway, this is already happening now. I have a few examples, related to messaging. One is a huge archive of instant messages stored by Miranda in one large file nobody understands (last time I checked there was no export feature), or an SMS archive stored on the iPhone (it seems to use sqlite format but that isn't helping much), or an RTF file generated by yet another software that is only readable on Windows... Time passes and you inevitably give up on that because there's just no time to go back to installing virtual machines or try to make existing software to convert from the old formats to newer ones. Sadly, he may be right.