20091108 Web archaeology
If you ask me if there is anything that fascinates me as much as computers do, it definitely is Archaeology. Being able to go somewhere, dig up a few layers of soil and then elaborate a list of facts about the habits of whoever used to inhabit that place seems to me almost magical. If you add both topics together, it simply becomes mind-boggling, specially taking into account the fragility of computer data — a mischievous magnet placed in the wrong place and data is not what you expected it to be anymore.
So the concept of preserving electronic data forever, or at least for quite a long time –say, a century–, is something that has always interested me. How do we make sure that whichever string of 0’s and 1’s we write down today are still available in one hundred years time, if we can barely cope with keeping backup copies of our important data?
