The BBC reports that Britain’s National Archives is in the midst of grappling with the problem of preserving obsolete digital file formats.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of “losing years of critical knowledge” because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

Anyone who has tried to open archived digital files knows the sort of problem that the National Archives faces, although theirs is of course on a much more immense scale than individuals or even businesses. Paper, it turns out, is much more reliable.

Ms Ceeney said: “If you put paper on shelves, it’s pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years.

“If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you’d have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it.”

“Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper,” warned Ms Ceeney.

This is a very real problem and it is something that will be of tremendous concern to future generations of historians and scholars who want to study our time. However, I expect that part of the ephemeral nature of certain digital technology will be solved (although it may end up being very expensive and/or labor intensive).

My faith is in technology itself to provide the tools necessary to fix this dilemma. I think the clearest example of a possible route to “fixing” the problem of digital permanence is emulation software. Because computer speeds continue to increase pretty much in line with Moore’s Law it is possible for a present-day (or future) system to allocate a portion of it memory, hard drive, processor, etc. to create an older machine virtually. VMWare is the company that first comes to mind with this sort of software.

The point is for some place like the National Archives (or even an individual or a business) that the answer may not be to keep converting documents to “universal” file formats but instead to ensure that tools exist to ensure that the data can be accessed in a roughly similar context to how it was originally created. If you have a file created using an obsolete program that was written for Windows 95, fire up a VMWare emulator and run a virtual Windows 95 system on a computer, install the appropriate program, access the file, etc.

Of course, this is much more difficult when the added variable of obsolete physical formats is thrown into the mix. If the data that the Windows 95 programs needs is on a 3 1/2″ floppy diskette and the computer running the emulator doesn’t have a drive that will read these disks, there’s still a problem.

Yet, the same principle behind software emulation could apply to solve these sorts of hardware problems. It can’t be too difficult of an engineering problem to build a disk drive to read an antiquated disk (after all, people built them 10-15 years or more ago!). It is probably more a question of money and resources than anything else. I suspect that in the next few decades libraries, companies, and even individuals may end up creating a market for new “old” computer hardware.

The complete article from BBC News: “Warning of data ticking time bomb”