Nowadays, various online storage services frequently appear, and how users can store various materials and data for a long time has become an important question, but in fact, Internet service providers do not give a permanent answer to a permanent question.
If your digital data—emails, text messages, photos, and documents—will soon disappear in a series of devastating electrical storms, how will you try to keep them?
This is the future disaster envisioned by Susan Donovan, a high school teacher and a science fiction writer based in New York. In her self-published novel «New York Hypogeographies«, she described a future: in 2250, massive amounts of data were deleted due to electrical interference. In the following years, archaeologists searched for artefacts from the beginning of the 21st century in the destroyed city apartments.
She said, «I was thinking, ‘If all digital products are gone, what changes will this bring to people?’»
In her story, catastrophic data loss is not the end of the world, but it is extremely destructive. It prompts people to change the way they save important data. Donovan wrote that the electrical storm brought about a renaissance in the printing industry. But people also have to think about how to store things that cannot be printed, such as augmented reality games.
Data is never completely secure. Imagine the burnt down library of Alexandria-destruction by fire may be the only reason you have heard of it. Digital data will not disappear in a huge fire, but it will disappear in a single click, or overtime, disappear in the silent degradation of the storage medium.
Today, we are used to this kind of deletion. There are too many examples of this-the disappearance of MySpace personal data in 2019 is one of the sensational examples. Many Google services that have been shut down over the years are also included. In addition, there are some online data storage companies that provide security for people’s data. Ironically, they sometimes specify certain data to be deleted.
In other cases, these services will run for a long time. However, the user may lose the details required to log in. Or even forget that they had an account. They may no longer be able to find the data stored there like an old letter in a shoebox in the attic.
The reason why Donovan is interested in «transitory» digital data lies in her personal experience. She specializes in mathematics at university and has many handwritten notes. She smiled and said, «I started taking electronic notes once, but I couldn’t find it afterwards.»
In the late 1990s, she also wrote an online diary. Now the diary is gone. The creative projects she worked on were no longer kept intact on the Internet. When she created these data, she thought she was creating something that could exist for a long time. It’s like a movie that can be played back indefinitely. But now, her understanding of what digital data is and how long it may last has changed.
She said: «It’s more like I wrote a play, you watch it, but all you get is memories.»
Because the stone steles, ancient books, and revelations that our ancestors carved on the walls of buildings endure for a long time, there is a prejudice in our culture that the words are strong over time. We often quote comments from centuries ago because someone wrote them down and kept a good copy. But in the digital form, the text is nothing more than the projection of light on the screen. As long as the light goes out, it may disappear.
However, there are some online data that can exist for a long time. Several websites have been maintained for at least 30 years. The data will continue to exist, even if we don’t want it. The phrase «the right to be forgotten» was born. As the technology writer and BBC network product manager Simon Pitt said in the technology publication OneZero, «The reality is that what you want will disappear, and what you don’t want will always exist.»
Jason Scott wants to adjust this balance. He manages the archives team, which is dedicated to preserving data, especially those of websites that have been shut down.
He hosted dozens of events and captured and stored information in a timely manner. But it is often impossible to save everything. When MySpace accidentally deleted about 50 million songs, an anonymous academic group gave the archives team a collection of nearly 500,000 songs they had previously backed up.
«For some bands, MySpace is the only proof of their existence,» Scott said. «The entire cultural library was destroyed.» MySpace apologized for the data loss incident at the time.
Scott said: «Once you delete this content, it disappears completely,» he explained the importance of proactively protecting data. He also believes that to some extent, society has unconsciously entered this situation: «We did not expect the online world to become so important.»
It should be clear now that digital data is unstable. But how to suppress its easy-to-disappear characteristics?
Scott said that he believes that there should be legal or regulatory requirements for related companies to allow people to recover their data for a period of time (for example, 5 years) after the online service is closed. During that time, anyone who wants their own information can download it, or at least buy a copy of the CD at their own expense and have the company send it to them.
He added that a few companies set a good example. Scott mentioned Glitch, a two-dimensional multiplayer online game that was removed from the Internet in 2012, more than a year after its launch. Scott said that from a data point of view, its liquidation process was «essentially perfect.» Others praised the practice: the game’s developers fully understood the disappointment of the players and gave them enough opportunity to download data from the company’s server before closing.
The code of some games was even made public, and multiple copies of Glitch developed by fans appeared in the following years.
However, should relevant companies be forced to follow this approach?
Teemu Ropponen of MyData (an international non-profit organization dedicated to building a fair, sustainable and prosperous digital society) believes: «We should have real-time permissions, such as requesting deletion, downloading or Migrating data-transferring data from one source to another.»
He and his colleagues are developing a system designed to make it easier for people to transfer important data about themselves, such as family history or resumes, between different services or organizations.
Roppnan believes that there are attempts within the EU to write such data migration into law. But there is still a long way to go.
Even if the technology and regulations are in place, this does not mean that saving data will become easy overnight. We have too much data, it is really elusive.
About 150 years ago, taking pictures of family members was a luxury that only the richest people in society could enjoy. This has been more or less true for decades. Even if the technology becomes more and more popular, it is not cheap to take many photos at once. Photos, therefore, become precious things. Nowadays, the camera function of smartphones means that people can take hundreds of photos every year, and taking pictures seems to be second nature.
«What will my children or grandchildren do with the 400 pet photos in my phone?» said Paul Royster of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. «What does this mean to them?»
Royster believes that saving all our data is not necessarily useful for future generations. He disagrees with Scott and Ropnan’s statement that «the law is the answer». He said that governments and legislators are often behind on technology-related issues and sometimes do not understand the system they intend to regulate.
Instead, people should develop the habit of selecting and saving important data. He said, «We should set aside a certain day of the year-as a data protection day, to sort out our data.»
Scott also suggested that we should think about what we really want to keep in case they are deleted.
«No one thinks that this data is something that must be saved at all costs. It is just data,» he said. «If the data is written, I will print it out.»
However, there is another option. Miia Kosonen of South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences and colleagues have been working to solve the problem of digital data storage in archives and national institutions.
She said: «We transcoded more than 200,000 old emails from the former editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest newspaper.» This is a digital data preservation pilot project hosted by Digitalia (note: a Spanish database). The transcoded email is later stored in a digital file.
As we all know, the US Library of Congress has a Twitter digital archive, but it has stopped recording every public tweet and has begun to «selectively» save them.
Can public agencies do some sorting and preservation of digital data on our behalf? If possible, we may submit information such as family history and photos to them for preservation and future reference.
Kosonen said that such projects naturally require funding, which may come from the public. Public institutions are also more inclined to retain information that has significant cultural or historical significance.
The core of this discussion is simple: it is difficult for us to know what we or our descendants really value in the future.
Archives or regulatory intervention can solve the shortness of data preservation to some extent. But to some extent, we may always need to live with this transient. Digital data is so convenient for daily life, we have almost no reason to try to store everything.
Whether to save or not depends entirely on personal motivation. Now, we decided to either try our best to save or not save this data. It is preservation in the true sense. It’s not just stored on the hard drive or cloud storage device at hand. We can also back up drives or more permanent media with instructions on how to store them for a long time.
This sounds like very boring and boring behaviour, but it can also be fun. It may only be necessary for a cultural movement to inspire us to move forward.
In the age of music streaming, many audiophiles still insist on buying vinyl records. Fans will still spend a lot of time getting printed copies of new works by their favourite authors. Maybe we need protectionists to launch a non-digital campaign. They are committed to re-creating the physical photo album. They take the trouble of handwriting notes or letters. These things may ultimately be easier to save than any digital thing. Digital things may always require you to trust a system established by others or a service organization owned by others.
As Donovan said, “If something is precious, then I think it’s dangerous to leave it in the hands of others.”