Don't lose your memories

It’s Christmas Day. Your family has finished opening presents and are all lounging quietly in the living room. Your father has fallen asleep, snoring loudly, his mouth wide open. Suddenly your 18-month-old appears at your father’s side, climbs up the arm of the chair and yanks your father’s false teeth right out of his mouth.

And you had your brand new camcorder rolling the whole time. It is a classic moment worthy, if not of a viral video on the Internet, then of preserving for your 18-month-old to watch decades later.

But how can you ensure you will still be able to play it?

“If you think of something you worked on your computer 10 years ago, can you open it?” asks Rene Georgopalis, former archivist for the MuseĂ© Heritage Museum, now working for the Archives of Alberta Society.

The answer to that question is most often no, or with great difficulty. The increasingly digital world has led to a problem that is not just the topic of discussion with archivists and historians, but in numerous other fields as well, even right down to people who keep their digital photos and music on a computer.

“Digital is difficult because digital formats keep changing,” says Alan Cross, a radio host whose show, The Secret History of Rock, is syndicated nationally. “So are you going to be able to play things back?”

Technology is always changing and as a result, how we record information is changing too. The media we use to communicate have always changed and evolved – cave drawings and stone tablets later gave way to papyrus, velum and paper. Drawings became symbols and symbols became written words. If someone handed you a tablet scrawled with hieroglyphics, what are the chances you’d be able to read it?

“It’s a big topic in the archival world right now,” Georgopalis says.

So what is the best way to preserve your files and make sure you and your descendants can enjoy them for generations? It depends on what the file is and what you want to do with it.

When it comes to music, vinyl, so long as it is properly stored, is the best format. With tape, the glue that binds the magnetic particles to the celluloid dries out over time. This can be fixed by baking it in an oven for 20 minutes at 350 F, but only to a certain extent.

“You can’t do that if you have plastic reels or cassettes because you’ll melt the casing. So that’s a problem,” Cross says.

CDs are also imperfect – water can easily penetrate the layers of plastic that make up the disc’s “sandwich,” which ruins the pits in which its data is stored. Travelling can also subject CDs to odd dangers, Cross said.

“There’s a rare fungus in Belize that eats aluminum and plastic, which is bad,” he said. The fungus was discovered after a researcher who visited Belize discovered one of his CDs was strangely damaged.

And when it comes to digital audio files, the biggest problem is change – there is no guarantee devices of the future will be able to read mp3 files.

“We have a ton of different formats – which are the ones that are going to survive any length of time so we can play them back?” Cross asks.

That’s the issue archivists and historians are trying to sort out, said Georgopalis. The best answer right now is simply taking whatever file you have – whether audio, photo or video – and converting it as new technologies emerge. This is called migration.

“In the future, whatever new format comes out, you should migrate that file into that format so that you can continue to read it,” Georgopalis says.

Technology is even impacting how the written word is used by historians, or how it could in the future. Researchers frequently use personal letters or other written documents to study history. But in our time, the written letter is giving way to e-mail, which can be easily deleted. This raised the question: If we keep deleting our e-mail correspondence, how will future historians study our civilization?

“There’s been a discussion that archivists need to be involved at the point of creation of records, whether it’s an e-mail or photograph or writing a report. You need to make sure you have a plan for it,” Georgopalis said.

As for how to make sure you don’t lose your precious files accidentally or due to circumstances beyond your control, both Cross and Georgopalis emphasize the need to back up your files. But there is no such thing as an indestructible backup. Even keeping your hard drive off site, or using a “cloud” storage system isn’t perfect as the building in which your data is stored isn’t immune to a fire or some other catastrophe.

Some argue that keeping files in their raw form, such as printing off photos, is the best method of storage, but Georgopalis points out that technology has actually made developed pictures less robust.

“You have to be careful because the developing processes right now aren’t as good as they used to be,” Georgopalis said. “The ink, the quality isn’t as high as it was when developing from negatives was popular.”

How to preserve today for the historians of the future, Georgopalis says, is a debate that is ongoing.

“I think a lot of times people think that archivists are stuck in the past, but we are actually very forward-thinking because we are actually concerned with the future and preserving information in the future.”