The history of Android (ars technica)

Posted Jun 17, 2014 10:42 UTC (Tue) by danpb (subscriber, #4831)
Parent article: The history of Android (ars technica)

This sadly shows how the move towards "cloud", while providing more resilient access to data in the short-medium term, is hastening the arrival of the digital dark ages in the long term. To quote

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotcloud12...

"If today’s digital archivists do their jobs well, in 100 years we will be able to run today’s Microsoft Word or play Doom (in an emulator if necessary)—but nothing today’s digital archivists can do will preserve historically relevant snapshots of today’s cloud-based services, because the archivists never even get access to a “complete” snapshot for preservation"

The history of Android (ars technica)

Posted Jun 18, 2014 10:50 UTC (Wed) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link] (3 responses)

> "If today’s digital archivists do their jobs well, in 100 years we will be able to run today’s Microsoft Word or play Doom (in an emulator if necessary)—but nothing today’s digital archivists can do will preserve historically relevant snapshots of today’s cloud-based services, because the archivists never even get access to a “complete” snapshot for preservation"

This is silly. Sounds to me like someone who never took a sincere look at how well non-IT folks are capable of managing their own personal data. At how much time 'normal' end users have to baby sit their data.

Nearly all people *not* working with IT I know do not have *any* digital document they had from 10 or 15 years ago. They either lose everything due to HD crashes or forget/don't bother to copy when they buy a new computer. Google Docs, Apple's iCloud or 'MS Office Cloud version' and their correspondents for other file formats (e.g. Flickr for images etc) put a much lower barrier to digital preservation than leaving all the file management tasks up to home end-users.

Seriously, how many non-IT people do you know that bother with:
- non-cloud backups?
- non-cloud off-site backups?

[...]

PS, you want snapshots of the cloud for archival? Who is paying for the storage?

The history of Android (ars technica)

Posted Jun 19, 2014 20:01 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

>> "If today’s digital archivists do their jobs well, in 100 years we will be able to run today’s Microsoft Word or play Doom (in an emulator if necessary)—but nothing today’s digital archivists can do will preserve historically relevant snapshots of today’s cloud-based services, because the archivists never even get access to a “complete” snapshot for preservation"

> Nearly all people *not* working with IT I know do not have *any* digital document they had from 10 or 15 years ago.

I think the above quote was talking as much about the programs that people use as the files that are stored in the cloud. Historians may not care overly that few people still have their Doom savegames (obviously there are many examples of personal files that are important), but it's important that they can still get doom running.

The history of Android (ars technica)

Posted Jun 22, 2014 22:22 UTC (Sun) by xnox (guest, #63320) [Link] (1 responses)

"""
Seriously, how many non-IT people do you know that bother with:
- non-cloud backups?
- non-cloud off-site backups?
[...]
PS, you want snapshots of the cloud for archival? Who is paying for the storage?
"""

I walked into a garage dealing with parts and a secretary dealing with incoming and outgoing shipment paper trail all day long. At the end of the day, she was packing her bag and walked over to a computer standing by the window on a desk without a chair. (clearly nobody works on it). Logged in, double clicked the icon create backup, entered encryption password to use, then placed a CD-R into the cd slot, burned the archive to the cd, pop it out, labeled it, opened the spindle bundle, took out a cd from her purse, put it into the bundle, and place the freshly burned one into her purse, zipped it up, said "toodles!" and waved us good bye.

non-IT -> she asked a colleague to send out an email, while I was there & no computer on her desk
non-cloud backup -> check (HDD on-site + burned CD bundles)
non-cloud off-site backup -> check (take last one in the purse overnight)

ps. Internet Archive & WayBack machine does find funding

There is very little commercial value in e.g. the original gmail code for example. Apart from the fact of not being able to run it without BigTable for example.

The history of Android (ars technica)

Posted Jun 25, 2014 9:34 UTC (Wed) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

Nice story. I do not doubt that there are plenty of competent secretaries that do perform as well as that, but I do not believe that is representative.

If you want anecdotes ;-)

I met plenty of PhD candidates that had no backups of their thesis files (Linguistics PhD candidates in case you are wondering). At least 1 candidate (Biology? Neuroscience? Don't remember) during my years had his/her (don't remember) house broken into. Laptop, desktop and external drives all gone. Those contained all copies of the dissertation material, as the "laptop" was the machine used while at the university (and controlled by the campus admins). There was no backup of the laptop files. They ran a story in the newspaper asking for file copies, so that is how I learned about it. That was some 10 years ago.

[...]

Do I know of histories of (very large) client companies running (mission critical) software that I worked on without backups? Yes. Sucks but it is true.