WIRED: Preserving the digital past is becoming a bigger and more pressing challenge

I’M SITTING staring at the tiniest snapshot of my life. It’s a box full of hard drives, raw and sharp with nuts and bolts and runnels, ripped out of a parade of previous computers and laptops. They grow smaller as the years go on: the first few are so big I didn’t even recognise them as computer storage at all. I thought maybe they were small space heaters.

I have another pile of cables that might possibly connect these hard drives to my current laptop. If I can find power adaptors for them. If they haven’t seized up, or their magnetism hasn’t evaporated.

And that’s just the 21st-century memories. Further back are silver platters of CD-ROMs and 250MB ZIP disks, tape drives and camera disks. I still carry them around each time I move, even though the felt-tip marker ink spelling out the years has faded from these.

There’s only one way to preserve the digital past, and that’s to constantly pass it forward and integrate it into your current system.

Don’t wait for it to rot away like these drives, but copy it as you go into a corner of your current active storage.

Not every file on those old drives is precious, and I hope I’ve managed to salvage many of them as I went. But even if we do that, all it gives us is a morass of unexamined data. Like many people, when I clean the files on my computer’s desktop, I simply pile them all into a folder marked “old desktop”.

Which I keep on my desktop. Inside that file, I know, is another folder called “old desktop”, which probably has another folder similarly named within it.

What backups I keep are the same; just endless shuffling of old dusty data under the current carpet.

We have no good tools to navigate and explore a lifetime’s worth of data, especially when that lifetime has spanned several kinds of computer, and multiple generations of Moore’s law. And palming this whole problem off onto “the cloud” – the remote storage and associated features offered by companies like Google and Amazon – doesn’t help.

At least when I move from one laptop to the next, I can transfer the old onto the new at relatively rapid speed. I’ve already filled 660GB of my current computer’s storage? How could I move that into the cloud? How could I retrieve it when I decide to move to the next service provider, or back onto my local machine?

I only know one person who seems to have managed this herding, sorting, and cataloguing of the past.

He is a friend who, not coincidentally, also runs a site documenting and collating the Samuel Pepys diaries online. Of all my colleagues, he is the one who knows where e-mails written a decade ago are to be found, or long lost, mutually-shared files.

We need software and systems that give us all the discipline and foresight of my Pepys friend, to collect and analyse bring forward the remains of our older days. I think, perhaps, this is one of those cases where the “alpha geeks” – those who have been using and have been abused by cutting-edge technology for far longer than others, and more than they would like – may be exploring what will be a mainstream problem in a few years.

What would we want from a tool that protected the past? Well, it would let us migrate our data to whatever new system we upgraded to. Both MacOS and Windows do this to a limited extent, but not with each other.

It would grind through old formats and turn them into new or open standards that could face the test of time. It would pull down, integrate, and store locally the data stored in the cloud, against the eventuality of losing it. And it would give us the tools to visualise, search and explore decades’ worth of past media.

It’s possible. I wonder, though, if we yet have the foresight to realise what we are already losing. Maybe. A few years ago, the number of users actively backing up their current data was a small minority. Now, the tools to do so have improved, and many of us have learned the hard way that it’s a necessity.

But even that is a constant race of sensible long-term prevention against the constant attractions of the next shiny tech leap forward. We may back-up our home computers. But do any of us back-up our smartphones? I think those files on those old drives are beyond repair.

My own data habits may be beyond fixing too. It could be too late for some of our digital past, but we can learn a lesson from its loss.

I think I know how we could start, too. The only real part of those lost files I miss are the photographs and audio and video of my daughter. I’d pay good money to pull those from the wreckage, and create a repository that could begin shifting my child’s more organised past into the future.