| |||||||||||||
On text documentsOn text documentsPosted May 14, 2012 12:36 UTC (Mon) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926)In reply to: On text documents by giraffedata Parent article: Who owns your data?
I suspect that at some point, there will be a necessary move from VM-as-supervisor to full emulation.
For example, if you're using VirtualBox, then at some point the version of Windows may no longer be supported as a client OS. That's the time to shift the image to something like QEMU.
I should point out I wasn't envisaging the idea of a VM disk image as long-term storage, more as a transport medium. If there's genuinely no other way to get the data into the VM to be used, then simply giving it a fake hard disk is the ideal method - use a more modern VM to save the data to the disk, shut that down and then present it to the VM that has the software you need.
I envisage the data itself being seperate to the VMs themselves in all of this - the VMs should be small "access points". The disk image idea is just a way to get data into them temporarily.
So, to be clear, we have a two parts to the solution - your storage, which you can do what you want with. Keep multiple copies, keep checking the medium is good (via md5sum or similar), and so forth. And the access system, which is a VM you check once a year. And if it needs to be updated/transitioned to emulation, at least you know and can deal with tha.
On a very large scale, this divides the work between two teams - a storage team maintain the actual archives, and an apps team who maintain the access.
Of course, this is only if we want full fidelity. If we're OK with bad reformatting by a later version of the program, then we don't need the second team at all. :-)
(Log in to post comments)
On text documents Posted May 14, 2012 14:25 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>For example, if you're using VirtualBox, then at some point the version of Windows may no longer be supported as a client OS. That's the time to shift the image to something like QEMU.
Why? There's no innate reason for that. Emulators can be rewritten and/or forward ported. Besides, x86 is highly documented and known. I wouldn't be surprised if it would still be used in 1000 years.
On text documents Posted May 14, 2012 16:08 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Emulators can be rewritten and/or forward ported. Remember the parameters of the problem. We're not talking in this thread about what society could do here; we're talking about a strategy one person could use to make his data live forever. (If we branch out into the larger question, then we can consider things like making laws that people have to make emulators available to other people). The fear is that people won't care enough about old documents to make the substantial investment in that forward porting. We see backward compatibility broken all the time, so it's a valid concern. Given that, a QEMU platform is surely a better guess at something the next Windows will run on than a VirtualBox platform. (If VirtualBox VMs become far more common hosts of Windows than x86 hardware, the opposite will be true). A system based on a chain of virtualization, which relies on there always being N-1 compatibility (the world will never switch to a new platform that can't run the previous one as a guest) also could work, but I think there's a good chance that compatibility chain will be broken in the natural course of things.
|
|||||||||||||