Sooner or later every format goes digital. Audio recordings. Video recordings. TV signals. Photography. Books.

That’s a wonderful thing, right? Digital means instant access. It means infinite duplication without loss of quality. It means instant transmission around the world. But unless we get diligent in a hurry, it could also mean a hit to our cultural record keeping.

Consider photographs, for example. We know what people looked like 150 years ago because the prints—yes, an analog format—are still around. 

What photos does anybody print these days? Only a few special ones. We view the vast majority of digital photos on screens. That’s convenient, they look great, and they’re often much bigger than 4 × 6 prints. But will they be viewable in 50 years, let alone 150?

That would be assuming a lot. For one thing, it would assume that the JPEG format used by most digital photo files will still be around in 150 years. JPEG has a fighting chance, because there are so many billions of photo files, but it’s not a sure thing. No computer format has been around for even 50 years.

The situation is even more grim when it comes to less mainstream files. Preserving video, for example, is going to be a nightmare. In the short history of digital camcorders, we’ve already accumulated a vast array of file types—MPEG-2, AVCHD, MiniDV, .MOV, .AVI, and so on—and that’s not even counting the millions of dying tape formats they’re stored on. What are the odds of these videos being playable in 50 years, let alone 100?

Already the current version of Microsoft Word can’t open some documents from the first versions of the program. Do we really expect to be able to play AVCHD videos in 100 years?

Let’s not even get into e-book formats. These book files (from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Apple) are incompatible, proprietary, copy-protected—and brand-new. You really think that their copy-protection schemes or even the companies that invented them will still be around in 150 years?

No, when you buy a copy-protected book for your Kindle or Nook or iPad, you should assume that what you are buying is a temporary right to read—not the book itself. There’s not much chance that you’ll be passing your book collection down to your children or grandchildren, as you might with real books.

Whenever I write about format loss and data rot, a few enterprising companies always pipe up. “We’ve got a new Web site called EverStore—we’ll store your digital files forever!” This is hilarious, considering that the Web as we know it isn’t even 20 years old. Not a single online-storage company has been around for more than 10 years—and several have already gone out of business, including big-name services such as AOL’s Xdrive. If you really think that the EverStores of today will keep your files safe for your grandchildren, well, here’s a brochure for my Brooklyn Bridge Investment Trust.

In other words, in the rush to record humanity’s stories in digital formats, it doesn’t seem as though we are giving equal thought to how we are going to preserve them.

It’s not hopeless, though. It’s just going to require a lot of work. Prints from 100 years ago have reached us largely by accident; we may stumble upon caches of them in attics, for example. But in digital, nothing happens by accident. Nobody is going to stumble across the photos on your hard drive in 2061, that’s for sure. (What hard drive have you owned for even 10 years?)

If, indeed, we care about sending our recordings into the next century, we’ll have to tend them like a garden. Consumer magnetic tape begins to deteriorate after about 15 years, so the time to convert your old audio and video tapes to digital is right now. Giant hard drives are cheap these days, and Google has plenty of tutorials on how to rescue those memories.

8 Comments

1. 1. g200boy 11:33 AM 4/7/11

   I respect David Pogue as a generalist and trend-watcher, and enjoy the heck out of his writing style. But predicting that files using today's image and video formats will become unreadable? Gimme a break!
   
   Some might fade from daily use, but it's not like the world is going to forget how to open the billions (trillions?) of files that have been created since the advent of digital cameras and video recorders.
   
   And David's contention that no format has survived even fifty years is bogus on a couple of levels. First, commercial computers have barely been around that long, so of course there are few formats that date back that far. Second, Google helped me find a service that reads 80-column punch cards -- a format that was invented in 1928! And there are emulators that allow programs written for the IBM 360 (introduced in 1964, 47 years ago) on modern computers.
   
   In short, I think David's file format concerns are way overblown. Deterioration of physical media, on the other hand, is a legit issue.

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2. 2. openeyes999 02:37 PM 4/7/11

   I think conversion software will eliminate much of this problem. Digital pics are just info, and as long as that info can be read it can reconstituted. Still, it is good to make "hard copies" of your most important stuff.

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3. 3. jricha34 05:09 PM 4/7/11

   I have to agree with g200boy. Most tools allow up-conversion from older formats and although early video may be difficult, images and audio I expect to be very easy to work with and move through the years.
   
   That being said, this is an interesting discussion and I don't think much thought has been put into this and I definitely agree with David that maintenance of these images/videos to keep them around will be more work than it was. No more tossing it in a box and your great grandchildren finding it when cleaning out the garage. No more "garage sale hunting" and finding a box of old pictures that someone had laying around. Even if that happened, the media likely wouldn't be viable. Not because it had become outdated, but because all of the media we currently have has a relatively short (in relation to a tintype photo or painting) lifespan. Get us into some crystal-based storage and then we can look at sharing across the millenia if we are still around.
   
   I think another more painful issue will simply be picture/video overload and categorization/cleanup. You don't take one good photo of the kids now, you take 50 photos and hope you get a good one thinking you will go back and clean up and you never have the time to do so. I took 10 photos of my cute as a button baby chihuahua the other day just before leaving for work. Had that been with a "real" camera that I had to pay to develop the pictures for I at most would have taken a single photo. I currently have no less than 1200 or so images on my iPhone 4 that have been taken since upgrading to it two months ago. When I used film based cameras it would take me months to fill a roll of film and even then I would usually end up taking it in before the roll was finished.
   
   joe

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4. 4. joecosby 06:34 PM 4/7/11

   I guess that makes it 4/4 that think file formats going obsolete is a pretty unlikely scenario. The author might look at Irfanview, it has support for an incredible number of file formats. Including Electronic Arts IFF ILBM from the eighties, Windows 3.x style icon, and FAX format.
   
   I think on the other hand storage medium death is definitely a valid concern.
   
   When you think about it though, a simple backup system fixes that. If you are backing up your system regularly, your media should last indefinitely.
   
   And really I think every computer owner should be taught the importance of a good backup system.

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5. 5. JDahiya 03:36 AM 4/9/11

   This article reminded me how I've lost digital files because the media deteriorated (old floppies) or the conversion to a newer file format didn't happen (didn't realise WordStar was not forever, alas). So, yes, Pogue, you are so right. We need to transfer to newer media, to make sure the formats are upgraded from time to time, and that we don't use lossier formats than we started with. Otherwise, poof.

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6. 6. pHenry 03:55 PM 4/16/11

   How long have we tracked solar flares? The 9.0 in Japan was unexpected as well. EMF and future weapons could settle this in a flash. Or maybe protection technology catchs up with destructive variables just in time. But we may need the time-bending DeLorean and a bananna to see what home remedy Gramma had for radiation exposure, worm hole lag and who's letter jacket is this?

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7. 7. billinhi 10:08 AM 4/19/11

   I think the EmFAHsis is on the wrong sillAHble. True, Microsoft has been one of the worst offenders in file format compatibility. Just look at how their Back Up file format has changed from Windows 3.0 on from one incompatible format to the next. But that is not the real threat.
   Fortunately this is a subject on which I am somewhat an authority. The real threat is well known. It is the obsoleting of the physical media. How many of you can read an 8" floppy disk? How about 5-1/2"? Same for the 1/2" 7 track reel tapes, punched paper tape, punched cards and on and on. I even have tons of 1/4" 1-7/8 ips Sony audio tapes which have long outlived any device which is capable of reading them.
   How much longer are the CD drives going to be around? This will be the next big threat. Sony is both aware of the problem and causing it! One of the biggest problems and most under appreciated function is transferring archives from old media to new media.

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8. 8. johnshaft 04:04 AM 8/6/11

   On the preservation of "digitised" images (Australian spelling variant), one cannot forget the most current effective form being archival optical media (good for storage the same time as traditional B&W wet processes). When stored in appropriate environmental conditions, this method far surpasses the MTBF (mean time before failure) which traditional magnetic and solid-state disks suffer, among other variables. The problem is, as David mentions, we are certainly not confident in the optical drive living for 150 years.
   
   On "infinite duplication without loss of quality," if one repeatedly saves an already-compressed image, vhs tape, cassette, or the common .mp3 track, generation loss will occur. Duplicating a CD will not result in an exact copy (verifiable if you listen very carefully).
   
   Finally, using the term "digitised photos" or "binary pictorial representation" to describe images when viewed on a monitor is more suitable than using the term "digital" where the Latin word digitalis refers to toes or fingers. This term is continually butchered (again, among many others).
   

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