In this blog post, we’ll examine the problem of past digital information potentially becoming unreadable in the future due to technological changes in digital storage media, hardware, and software, as well as the importance of digital archaeology in preserving it.
Will digital information eventually become unreadable?
It’s the day before the team project deadline. The file a team member sent me yesterday won’t open because it’s incompatible with the version of the software installed on my computer. It turns out the software on the team member’s computer was an outdated version.
There’s a joke that was once popular on the internet. It’s about how floppy disks—which were widely used until about a decade ago—are now hard to find.
These days, almost all information and records are stored in digital form. To read data stored on a specific storage medium, two things are necessary: hardware to read the digital information stored on the medium, and software to convert that digital information into a form we can understand. Without either of these, the records contained on the storage medium are nothing more than a meaningless string of data. This hardware and software serve a role similar to that of a language, as they are the means by which we exchange information.
However, as times change rapidly, the hardware and software we use to store information are undergoing generational shifts at a very fast pace. Imagine returning home after a 10-year overseas assignment only to find that people are speaking a language completely different from the one you knew. Digital information can find itself in a similar situation.
Technological Generational Shifts Outpacing Storage Media
Data stored on storage devices also has a lifespan. However, since the physical lifespan of storage media varies greatly depending on manufacturing methods, quality, frequency of use, and storage environment, it is difficult to pinpoint the lifespan of a specific medium with a single number. What is important is that we must consider not only the rate at which the storage medium itself becomes physically damaged, but also the rate at which devices capable of reading that medium disappear, as well as the rate at which the software needed to interpret the data becomes obsolete. In fact, in the field of digital preservation, the technological obsolescence of hardware and software is treated as a major issue, separate from the physical lifespan of the medium.
Floppy disks, which were widely used just a few decades ago, can now only be used on computers equipped with floppy drives. Similarly, even if the digital tapes containing recordings of our childhood remain intact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find devices capable of playing them back. Even if the storage medium itself remains physically intact, accessing the data becomes difficult once the devices needed to read it disappear. Therefore, when it comes to the long-term preservation of digital information, simply choosing a durable storage medium is not enough; ongoing management—such as migrating data to new storage environments and maintaining multiple copies—is necessary.
This is not merely a hardware issue. If a widely used Hangul word processing program loses compatibility with other document formats or programs and is no longer supported in the long term, it may become difficult to read documents created with that program in the future using the same method. Even within the same program, different versions may fail to read files, and if the program itself disappears, interpreting the contents of files dependent on that program becomes much more difficult. Of course, it is possible to reverse-engineer the necessary hardware and software by analyzing the data and storage devices, or to recreate the past execution environment through emulation. However, these tasks require significant cost, time, and expertise. In the field of digital preservation, emulation—which recreates old hardware and operating system environments—is actually utilized as one of the key preservation methods.
To prevent this phenomenon, it is important to preserve not only the content itself but also the information regarding the file formats, applications, operating systems, and execution environments necessary to interpret and run that content. In the past, this concept was sometimes described as “digital parchment,” but in today’s digital preservation, rather than entrusting everything to a single storage medium, actual preservation strategies include format migration—converting data to standardized formats—emulation to recreate legacy execution environments, and methods that preserve metadata alongside the execution environment. This is because long-term preservation of digital materials requires the ongoing management not only of the materials themselves but also of the environments necessary to read and understand them.
An Era That Calls for Digital Archaeology
It is, to some extent, inevitable to be swept away by the torrent of rapidly advancing technology. However, unless one is willing to invest enormous amounts of time and money in “digital archaeology” to “decipher” information that has become unreadable decades later, it would be unwise to store important information on a single digital storage device and then neglect it for an extended period. The key to the long-term preservation of digital information is not maintaining a specific storage device indefinitely, but rather continuously verifying that the data remains intact, replicating it across multiple storage media and environments, and migrating it to new formats and storage environments as needed. In fact, the field of digital preservation utilizes methods such as format conversion and emulation to address technological obsolescence, and recent efforts have even included research into new storage media, such as glass, with the goal of long-term preservation lasting thousands of years or more. However, since the existence of the technology and equipment needed to read and interpret these new storage media must be guaranteed in the future as well, it is difficult to consider the issue of digital information preservation fully resolved.
