Christian Lindholm has a rough end of year, electronics-wise (link below). Machines acting up, licenses expiring, and data at risk. It brings up an running discussion we’ve been having since I joined his Lifeblog team at the start of ’04 – the future of memories.
Here’s a note to Christian:
Ah, dear friend, some things never change.
Why is it that we cannot find a solution? Is it because we are all atomists migrating into the digital world, so we don’t get it?
What do the digital natives believe? Or have they not accumulated enough digital baggage to care? Or do they not even have a concept of something digital vanishing?
Of can we not find a solution because the solution is to change the way we store digital memories, the way we need to put them in the cloud, the way we put more and more of our past into bits?
Heh, we’ve been wresting with this for some time, Cassandras of the digital future. Not to be dramatic, but Humanity must deal with this or we will have a past we cannot revisit.
After a chat with your British Library friends, go over and check out the Long Now Foundation projects to preserve things for millenia (and I need to find that seminar about it).
Link: ChristianLindholm.com: Fragility of Digital Life:
I am back on-line after a two week long outage. This was due to some old billing address with my provider coupled with a bit sloppy service at Saunalahti, my host provider. This combined with an upgrade to N95 8GB that went worse than expected, as I could not use the old Lifeblog 2.1 on it. This led me to export all my 30.000 items out of Lifeblog, make a back up, restore the back up. A full week-end of computing time. Soon the beta of Bootcamp expires, so I have to do another week-end of fiddling. The only thing I conclude is a digital archive is vulnerable, I have made decent back-up’s of my Lifeblog, have some in London, some in Finland on several HD’s etc. still I feel extremely fragile.
