Don’t Just Store It, Move It

Kevin Kelly on our digital reality:

Digital information is very easy to copy within short periods of time, but very difficult to copy over long periods of time. That is, it is very easy to make lots of copies now, but very difficult to get the data to copy over a century. For two reasons:

1) Formats change. Because of rapid technological evolution the “language” which one storage media speaks can become obsolete (incomprehensible) in only a few years. Or the hardware that speaks that language becomes so rare, it cannot be accessed. Who can read the data on ten-year old floppy disks?

2) The storage medium itself can decay. Turns out that paper is much more stable over the long term than most digital media. Magnetic surfaces flake, peel, shatter. And the supposed durable CDs and DVDs aren’t very stable either.

Keep it moving people:

The only way to archive digital information is to keep it moving. I call this movage instead of storage. Proper movage means transferring the material to current platforms on a regular basis — that is, before the old platform completely dies, and it becomes hard to do. This movic rhythm of refreshing content should be as smooth as a respiratory cycle — in, out, in, out. Copy, move, copy, move.

In other words, anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward.

Kelly says we don’t know the length of the cycle yet — how often we need to move, copy, move, copy — but he’s guessing it’s 5 years. That sounds about right to me.

I’ve been following the practice since college, trashing much more than I move along. And I’m noticing that as the technology moves forward, the cycle shrinks. Film lasts longer than videotape, and videotape lasts longer than most digital formats these days.