Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [67]
Backup is a little different than replication. A replica is important, but what if you accidentally change an important file? The next day you look at the file and realize you’ve wiped out some valuable information. You can’t turn to a replica, because it has faithfully copied your destructive changes. A backup is a snapshot of your data at a given moment, to cover you in the event that you need to get back to an older version.
Consumer software to perform replication and backup is readily available and even free in some cases. Pretty good solutions are already in place. Higher demand will give us all the solutions we could want at an affordable price. The bug of outright data loss has already been fixed with replication and backup, so we just need to ask for it—and the more of us who ask for it the better and cheaper it will get.
However, outright loss is not the only threat to our data’s longevity. We may also experience data decay. Suppose you are user of SuperPhotoEdit version 3.0 and you create a collage of family vacation pictures. Ten years later, you launch version 8.3, and try to load the old collage, only to see “File format not supported.” Or, even worse, you have a new computer, and have no desire to buy SuperPhotoEdit. All you want is to see your collage, but you are two hundred dollars and a half hour of installing away from that.
Will your data be readable fifty years from now? Jim Gemmell and I posted some audio files on the Web in 1997 and about five years later they couldn’t be played. The team at Microsoft in charge of such things explained that their license for the format had expired and the company that had the rights to the format had gone bankrupt. It was illegal to make the clips playable, with no real likelihood that the company would ever be resurrected to make it legal again. It was a dead format.
I call this the “Dear Appy” problem, after a flight of fancy in which I imagined poor forlorn data, utterly abandoned, writing a letter to the application that created it:
Dear Appy,
I thought we had a commitment. You were going to understand and support me forever. What happened? Where are you?
Signed,
Lost and Forgotten Data
A really complete solution to Dear Appy would be able to emulate any hardware, operating system, and application for all time. Then you could run the old program and open your file. That isn’t going to happen, but most of what we want and need is not rocket science; it is possible with a little care and, again, by our demanding new software and services rather than being content with the status quo. I’ll cover some practical steps for today in Chapter 9, and look into the future for Dear Appy in Chapter 10.
DATA ENTANGLEMENT
No one can take away your bio-memories, but some of your e-memories might not even belong to you. Were I to resign from Microsoft right now, they would immediately demand that I perform a partial e-lobotomy, removing all work-related e-memories.
When Jim Gray went missing, there was a fair bit of consternation about what to do with his notebook computer. It was loaded with all kinds of Microsoft information, some being proprietary to the company. It also contained quite a few photos and a fair bit of correspondence that was quite personal. Microsoft wasn’t so sure it would be a good idea to give Jim’s wife, Donna, access to the information. What if she saw something confidential? Donna felt uncomfortable having Microsoft employees looking at it before she did. What if they saw something very private? Microsoft, having possession of the machine, had the advantage. It took nearly a year for Donna to be given the