How safe are our data?
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Author | Erhan Toker |
| Profession | Architect M.Sc. | |
| Autodesk Authorized Consultant | ||
| Software Specialist | ||
We produce larger amounts of numerical data as technology sets its roots in our daily lives. The music we play on our cell-phones, photos we take, movies we watch, e-mails sent and received by us, drawing files, documents other countless types are examples.
A large portion of us use high capacity hard-discs to store multimedia files. Some of us are more of fanatics and record on DVDs then label them and stack them to make up neat achieves. There are even nice bags and gadgets for these stuff.
Let’s get a break right now and remember which media we used in the past: perforated papers, music casettes, microdrive (for ZX spectrum), 5.25” and 3.5” floppy discs, magneto-optic discs, ZIP drives, digital and analog bands, hard drives (hard discs), CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, flash drives and others we cant remember. Most of these media have been abandoned. Some of them still in use. The reason for those abandoned can be lack of capacity, reliability or simply their technology being left behind. We can understand lack of capacity or reliability, but the reason for abandoning the technology generally doesn’t have sound explanations most of the time and can be a little pain sometimes. Like Blu-Ray and HDD competition. It was totally a commercial one and finally HDD was out as Blu-Ray won. Fortunately this happened while HDD wasn’t all that commonly used. There are many such stories we can find from the past. Enough of talking..
I talked about all these because I wanted to draw attention to the safety of our data. Have you ever thought “will I be able to open this photograph” after you made a digital copy of the file? You saved your photos on a DVD. How long will it last? Some say ten others say thirty years. I have seen DVDs that don’t work after a year. Let’s say all went well and it works after thirty years. Will there be DVD drives then? Your files that were on the hard drive lasted 50 years, will there be computers that still use SATA or IDE? You ought to panic when thinking this way, as all the answers to these questions are ‘no’. The most suitable way is to transfer the data to newer platforms as they emerge. All this can be of quite a trouble for someone with increasing data over the years. If you want to try this method for ten years, I’d say you’ll give up in three years. The only way out is the people providing hostage services on the internet. You can open an account for a given fee and store all your data by uploading them, and they are no longer your problem. Two points to pay attention on this method; slow upload speeds (which will no longer be a problem with advancing technology) and your data being in the hands of someone else. I don’t think you should worry much about this. As a principle, digital data is never completely safe. Still you can encrypt or encode your data before uploading them.
All in all, our data’s future is not safe as technology develops further and the competition heats up. Print photos that are important for you and they’ll last for a hundred years, buy the movies and they’ll last a good ten years, print the documents and they’ll last a twenty years. Don’t worry about the rest.
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