Digital Dark Age
SAN Recovery - Digital Dark Age
Digital Dark Age refers to a possible situation in future when it will be difficult to access old documents stored in electronic media because either the hardware or the software used to access these documents becomes obsolete by then. The problem affects not only text documents but also other digital files including audio, video and all other forms of electronic documents. The term was introduced at the Time and Bits conference held in 1998 and was co-sponsored by Long Now Foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute.
Digital Dark Age can occur due to several reasons. Most important of them is the use of hardware devices, for example, storage devices that are tend to become obsolete after several years. An example is the 5 ΒΌ- inch floppy disk. Currently there is no disk drive available readily that can read the data from these disks.
Another reason for the possibility of digital Dark Age is the use of file formats that can become obsolete over a period of time. This problem occurs due to the lack of appropriate software that can retrieve the data. An example of such file formats is the LZH format that was popular during the 1980s. The software installed in modern computers cannot read this format.
There are several instances of digital Dark Age reported worldwide. The most well-known among them is the case with NASA, whose early records about the 1976 Viking landings were found to be either contained in obsolete storage devices such as magnetic tapes or using obsolete file formats.
