~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, 
without either virtue or talents ... The artificial aristocracy is a 
mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to 
prevent its ascendancy."

- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tuschl, Joshua (Nashville,TN-US)" <[log in to unmask]>


>I think we're focusing too much on the storage medium in this thread.

I agree ... :)

> Hard drive space is becoming exponentially cheaper and there is no
> reason that we can't store even large collections on hard drives.
> Generally, every organization not run out of a basement is going to have
> a server nowadays for sharing information between colleagues. If you
> talk to anyone in IT, they will tell you that any server you have needs
> a way to backup the data such as magnetic tape.  As long as your
> information is important enough to preserve for posterity, it's
> certainly important enough to backup.  When your old server is out of
> date, you copy the old hard drive to the new one.  If we're talking
> about the size of data that fits on a DVD, then the amount required is
> pretty trivial (500GB hard disk is $150).  This solves the problem of
> making sure the data stays on a currently readable medium, unless we see
> the demise of the PC (which seems to be going the other way with iPhones
> running OSX and refrigerators that access the Internet).  The magnetic
> tape (which must be kept off-site) is your insurance policy in case of
> hardware failure. This system isn't foolproof but paper has its own
> issues, too.
>
I agree again, more emphatically ... yet, even though servers are 
corporately pervasive, they are generally still not available to mom-and-pop 
and SOHO CRM operations. My intent was to explicate the presently easiest 
[Luddites fear and loathe technology enough already, if there's the slighest 
difficulty in understanding or using the process, they might start troweling 
your hardware, and certainly your suggestions] and most economic method for 
the small-operator to get boxes of paper files into a cheap and commonly 
available digital media with their current PC [and if the DVD burner seems 
too much like scary alien technology, they've bound to have a son or nephew 
or neighbor's kid who's quite adept in using them for burning bootleg movies 
and can lend a hand in showing how]. Conversely, the remote USB2/SATA2 drive 
housing (holding an obscenely fast, and cheap, 700gb hard-drive) is what I'm 
using to do (automatic nightly, whilst I sleep) backups of the data on the 
primary (network RAID comprised of 4 200gb SATA2) drive on my home network. 
As you point-out, this is the most economic digital storage ... for the 
computer adept. BUT harddisks have their own set of problems ... they are 
highly complex electro-mechanical devices controlled by an extraordinarily 
complex circuit involving multiple ICs (essentially, the controller board on 
each hard-drive is a separate minicomputer with a communication interface 
that talks to your PC and relays/translates the digital stream 
back-and-forth). There are many different schemes for stacking the data onto 
the surfaces of the hard disk plates (you can construe this as the digital 
stream of 0s&1s being encrypted into different languages). So, though your 
point about the ease of transferring the stored digital files to the new 
technology whenever it comes along should be appreciated (and alleviate 
those horrid anxieties of what's gonna happen to the data in the future) 
it's far from a panacea. I didn't want to scare Mary with all this 
techno-talk, but to reassure her that her problem can be solved, by herself, 
and cheaply.

The real point being missed in all this discussion is that "It's not the 
media or the format [stupid?]!" It's getting the paper converted to digital 
form ... no matter the format ... no matter the media ... if it's digitized, 
then it can be easily manipulated, translated, ported and/or transferred to 
the new technology with the puch of a button. If you want to ensure 
preservation of images of such low-value/high-volume data as archeological 
field records, then you have no viable option but to digitize it.

> I think the more immediate issue that has only been hit upon briefly is
> the problem of file formats. How many of us use proprietary software
> formats for their documents?  If you keep your documents in Word, Excel,
> Access, WordPerfect, etc. then you have the problem that your files
> might survive but not the data (confession - I'm guilty of using these
> myself). These formats do not freely give out their file specifications
> and can really only be opened correctly by the program and version they
> were created in.  How many Appleworks, Dbase, old versions of Word and
> WordPerfect files are orphaned out there?  Even if you kept the files on
> a medium that would last forever, chances are that your Word 2000 file
> will not be readable when you upgrade to Word 2015.

Josh, formats are simple things ... conceive of them as different languages 
(actually more like dialects) that computers speak. It's no great task to 
decipher and translate them. This is just a strawman ... a scary boogey only 
to the techno-illiterate. There is not one computer format that has been 
invented, even one invented for the highest form of cryptological security, 
that hasn't been able to be cracked (and for which you cannot find freeware 
to do translations in 5-minutes on the Internet). Not one! So where does 
this Luddish fear come from that there are archaic unreadable formats? 
Completely unfounded, I assure you. The situation has only gotten better as 
the computer age has progressed ... except when thwarted by avaricious 
motives (did anyone say Microsoft) backwards compatibility has generally 
been the rule ... or even in the case of the evil planned obsolescence (as 
is expected in the case of Office 2007) for venal purposes, there is the 
ability to TRANSFER/TRANSLATE the old into the new (it's usally the menu 
choice labeled "Save As").

Excuse the rant, you made some good points ... but you really ought to get 
some help for your phobias *grin*

My best regards,
Bob Skiles