Why paper will last longer than digital data ever will

This is not one of those Luddite pieces that advocates writing with goose quills and shuns electronic and digital technologies. I wouldn’t be writing a blog or publishing my books for e-readers if I felt that way.

The reason why I think believe that paper will last longer than digital data is pretty simple. Paper (and I’m including papyrus and velum) has been with us for about 3,000 years. Computers have been in popular use for less than 40, depending where you choose to count from.

Those of us who are old enough to remember and participate in the early days of personal computing used to think 5.25 inch floppy disks were pretty cool. Double-density disks could store 160KB of data. Having one or two built-in disk drives was seriously  cutting edge. By the time they were replaced by the 3.5-inch floppy – which to us looked like those neat data squares in Star Trek – we thought they held more data than we’d ever need. My first computer with a hard drive (named after some flower or fruit) could store 20MB of data. Still, back then, using a primitive word processing program like SuperSCRIPSIT or Symatec’s Q&A, hundreds of pages of text would use very little disk space.

Now, here’s the crux of the issue: Can anyone read those disks today? Any one have a drive for ZIP drive? They were a staggering advancement, and companies have back-rooms full of them with data they hope they never need.

A few people can read old disks. These range from hobbyists who never threw anything away, to specialist data recovery companies that charge small fortunes to read what everyone could until a few years ago.

In the UK, banks and insurance companies are paying out millions of pounds to people who bought mis-sold PPI policies, but in many cases, the banks are unable to find any records of the policies. Many policies were bought in pre-Microsoft Windows days and the data was recorded on tape, or on disks that can no longer be read. In other cases, companies have been taken over several times and the systems never fully integrated, making cost-effective data retrieval impossible.

There is also the problem that to most young people, “archive” means shred. Once it’s left the trading floor, it’s gone, never to be found. Companies acquiring companies often have little idea where the archives are, let alone how to access what is contained in the old data storage devices.

We are talking about less than thirty years ago. Suppose computers were around in 1918, a mere hundred years – what are the odds anyone could read the data – assuming it was still readable?

Paper? It’s right there, even if you don’t know the language, someone will.

Ironically, a few years back, the estate of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry discovered boxes containing 200 5.25-inch floppy disks, presumably filled with the great man’s thoughts – and possibly some unproduced scripts. The world awaits disclosure of what was eventually revealed. Did they contain more classic science fiction, or were they just digital versions of the laundry lists found by Catherine Moreland in Northanger Abbey?

If you want anyone to know what you were doing or thinking fifty years from now, write it down – on paper.