ComputerWeekly’s email today had a warning from David Cripps, CISO of Investec, made at an EMC Conference about how ‘years of irreplaceable tape backups are inaccessable’ because there isn’t the kit around anymore to read them.
I have a similar problem. On the shelves of my office I have boxes of floppy discs, diskettes and other media dating back to the early 1980s and containing the full output of Holway’s musings in the Holway Report, SystemHouse and HotNews. But I cannot read them anymore.
The same applies to my boxes of audio cassettes, VHS videos etc. Even my vinyl collection is unplayed in years as my turntable is inoperative.
I do have access to everything (including every digital photo I have taken) since 1995 on my shared hard drive. But I wonder what would happen to that in the future? And before you say ‘cloud’, that worries me even more. What happens when I become old and infirm and my offspring don’t bother to pay the annual subscriptions?
It is an interesting fact of life that the only accessable records I have prior to 1995 are in paper form in my bookcases. Every Holway Report, every SystemHouse, hard copy printouts of every HotNews item and, of course, piles of photograph albums. Along side them are the photo albums of my Dad, my Grandfather and some early pictures of my GreatGrandad. Then I have boxes of family letters – many in envelopes with penny red stamps on!
They have passed the Test of Time rather better than all my current digital media. And they call this progress!