Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [66]
PART THREE
CHAPTER 8
LIVING THROUGH THE REVOLUTION
New technologies have always forced mankind to adapt to new realities, from iron tools to mobile phones. The changes worked on our societies by powered machinery were so radical that we refer to the industrial “revolution.” We are now beginning the Total Recall revolution.
I’m a technologist, not a Luddite, so I’ll leave abstract discussions about whether we should turn back the clock to others. Total Recall is inevitable regardless of such discussions. However, as a realist I also know that we must come to grips with the implications of our technology. Some implications I see as “bugs” to be fixed. For example, an unresolved bug of the industrial revolution is pollution. Other implications are simply changes that we must adapt to, such as modern transportation implying that one can commute to work and get fresh fruit from another continent.
This chapter is about the changes generated by Total Recall, both the bugs to be fixed, and the adaptations that will be required. These changes are mostly about what happens to our e-memories once we have them. Could we lose them? Could they fall into the wrong hands? What is their proper use? Different cultures may come up with different answers. Technology will yield unintended negative consequences and pleasant surprises too. If the answers aren’t all clear, most of the questions are.
DATA LOSS AND DECAY
Right now we face data decay and loss. Data often only exists in one place, so a crash of the host device means permanent loss of the data. Files formats may become unreadable over time. We need improved data longevity.
One morning in the fall of 2008 my notebook computer wouldn’t start up. I was in Australia and it was all I had. I broke out in a sweat. Questions fired off in my mind: Is the hard drive shot? How much isn’t backed up? How will I get my e-memory back in action? I decided the biggest problems would be a presentation and some articles if the disk was bad, because they had no backup. I also faced the hassle of paying bills without Microsoft Money, which I’ve come to count on.
Fortunately I had backed everything up onto my assistant’s machine in San Francisco two weeks before getting on the plane. I could download my e-memory as of two weeks ago from her, or I could just use it straight off her machine when I was on the Internet. My most recent e-mail was intact because it was on our corporate e-mail server.
This episode reminded me that I need to be prepared to lose whatever is not backed up. I had just finished authoring a presentation and was crazy not to have copied it to a USB thumb drive.
I believe the chief obstacle to data longevity is low expectations. For too long, too many of us have been content to see the data in our PCs, PDAs, and cell phones as transient. We shrug at losing the phone numbers from our cell phones, or not being able to do anything with files on an old floppy disk. This tolerance for data decay was natural when personal computers were new and few people had any experience with electronic storage. Fortunately, a couple of decades into widespread computer usage, we are learning better. I’m encouraged by signs of this trend, for example, seeing that Dell notebooks ship with Dell DataSafe Online software installed to perform backups to their site.
Protecting against outright data loss involves two techniques: replication