Re: Microform developments
- From: "Don Moody" <dpmoody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:08:03 +0100
"John Prentice" <johnp.usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:6lbe6nFbhb55U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Graham Hoult wrote:
One has to consciously make the effort (and spend the money) to
backup from one electronic format to the next ... to the next ...
to the next ....
In days past, this was a valid argument. The difference is that in
days
past, the internet either didn't exist at all, or was the exclusive
province of American defence geeks and a small, select clique of
college
students (of which I was one, by the way).
The internet is now ubiquitous. One of the side-effects of the
modern
internet has been the exchange of data between people and
institutions
that may be half a planet away from each other. Backup is no longer
a
matter of relying on fragile tapes in obscure formats, or removable
hard
disk cartridges that grew more corrupt with every dismount.
The examples that have been mooted, of the Domesday Project optical
discs, aren't relevant today. The internet has ensured that
information
of any value becomes geographically distributed, and is agnostic of
its
method of storage.
We are no longer at the mercy of undocumented file formats, too. All
of
the common file formats are very well documented indeed. Even those
(and
I'll cite Microsoft Office formats as an example) that aren't open
standards have been deconstructed by third parties, and that
information
widely distributed.
The world wide web itself is backed up in many places.
www.archive.org
attempts to keep and maintain dated backups of most of the web sites
in
the world; Google spiders and archives huge amounts of information;
many
other sites and companies spider the web for their own reasons, and
quite a few make their archives available in various forms.
These days, the problem is not the risk of losing data, but of
containing its release, as recent incidents involving lost CDs,
laptops,
memory sticks and Civil Servants' jobs demonstrate rather well.
One other point is worth making. The old saying, that the first
backup
you make is the one after the disaster, applies less in modern
times.
Just about any curator of valuable data factors in backup, and
effective
backup at that, into their systems. It's well appreciated that
frequent
off-site backup is of paramount importance. The internet makes that
trivially easy - no more military-grade tape vaults needed, when you
can
send your data over a wire to somewhere the other side of the world,
if
necessary.
I'll cite an example. In the past couple of days, I've set up a new
web
site for a client. The site is backed up locally. The backup is then
copied by another computer in a different city onto its local drive.
That is archived onto a file server on the same network. The file
server
is regularly backed up onto USB hard disks that are kept off site.
This
may seem excessive, but in fact it's -normal- for a professional
organisation.
The internet has changed everything. You have to be supremely
(un)talented to lose data permanently now.
What you write is all very true for a professional organisation, but
it is substantially untrue for those NOT in organisations with money
and expertise to throw at the problem. I suspect that most of the home
users of PCs wouldn't operate or be covered by the procedure you
commend. Probably because they don't know what is possible and don't
want to learn geeky things.
I'll repeat a story from long ago. The days when a DX66 with 4Mb was
hot stuff, and doing anything involved playing silly buggers with
interrupt settings and god knows what. My computer went down and a
very geeky bloke came along to fix it. The main burden of his
conversation was that most of his visit was unnecessary because I, and
every other home user, shouldn't operate computers unless and until
we could muck about with BIOS, registries, interrupts and all the
other 'innards'. I asked him if I could borrow his car keys. Put them
in my pocket and said I'd let him have them back if, and only if, he
could explain in exact chemical detail what happened in a car engine
cylinder immediately after a spark passed through a petrol/air
mixture. And he'd better be exactly right because, along with many
years worth of students at KCL I'd been taught by the prof whoworked
it out. We all had to mug it up because a question in the exams was
inevitable. The geek's response was that he didn't want to know and
didn't need to know in order to use the car.
Then I told him to substitute computer for car and my reaction for
his. As a typical home user I don't want to know and don't need to
know about how it works. I just want to use the damn thing to do
whatever the subject is that I am interested in. As soon as anything
gets 'clever', I'm probably not going to bother to do it. And if it
costs money and time there is practically nil prospect of doing it.
Now apply that to back-ups, transfer between formats and operating
systems, and anything else complex in the hands of a home user of a
PC. If it doesn't happen automatically within the system itself it
almost certainly won't happen. So when the inevitable crash comes,
there is no secure back-up somewhere else and very likely all is lost.
Probably all is lost when a step-change occurs in technology. When the
time came to dump the DX66 for a change to XP machines there was no
automatic simple dumping of old data and programmes from one to the
other. On that occasion I cheated by handing the complete old machine
to my son and telling him to get onto CD in a usable form all the data
he could. It was not an easy job, but he stuck at it because knowing
how to do it was obviously of use to his clients who were migrating
technologies at the time. In the event not a single one of the small
solicitors, accountants and other professionals he serviced was even
slightly interested in doing it for themselves. As he got into the
work he found many of them had no back-ups at all.
So I'm afraid that outside the 'big' organisations which can afford to
hire people with your level of professionalism, the usual truth is
that what you do won't get done. There is one small group of people
who get in enough of a twitch about back-ups of hard-won data that
even if working alone at home on one machine they'll probably do at
least some of what you describe. They're called genealogists.
Don
.
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