Bit Rot: How To Ensure That Our Digital Legacy Isn't Lost

The concept of having messages that would be accessible to people living centuries from now may seem relatively simple, given our ever-increasing technological advances and data storage facilities. Just like sailors who leave messages in bottles to be found days or even years later, this information we constantly upload seems safe and secure. This, however, isn't the case as the problem of bit rot–digital degradation–has become attendant to long-term retrieval of information, as described by one of the "fathers" of the internet, Vint Cerf.
The radioactive waste disposal site a little outside Carlsbad, New Mexico built in 1979, stored radioactive waste in salt deposits in the area. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) held very dangerous radioactive material making the need to warn the future generations of what lay within the area dire. In 1992, a team was set up to brainstorm on this problem and produce a means of communication that would stand the test of time and would also be understandable by the future generations. The risk of bit rot ruled out digitized information storage as the later generations might not be able to assess these warnings. The warning markers they were set to create must have certain qualities. They must have the durability to withstand the destructive tendencies of humans. They should be able to give complicated information about the dangers of radioactive waste and must transcend the language and cultural barriers.
The answers lay with our ancestors who, lacking options, had recorded all the history we know today on durable storage "structures"–art, rocks, paper, and Earth. At long last, the WIPP team had found a way to send a message to the generations to come using a series of such markers that pointed the site to be a radioactive hell that should be avoided.
These markers remain to date, a constant reminder of the illusion we live under–the immortality of information we upload on the internet. With the progression of technology, and the introduction of newer, seemingly more secure means of data storage which provide for easy accessibility, there is a risk of digital degradation. Vinton Gray Cerf, known simply as Vint Cerf, who is one of the American Internet pioneers had termed this bit rot. Storing the information isn't the problem, retrieval may not be an issue but according to Vint, "If the new software cannot understand, we've lost the information." What Vint was essentially saying is that our idea that all documents, files, and information in general that we upload to the internet will last forever is false. Vint Cerf had reiterated the idea of digital vellum–a concept that ensures that all digital information can be interpreted decades from now irrespective of software advancement, in effect, beating bit rot.
Bit Rot and Digital Vellum
These are the concepts that the internet father has constantly warned about. While he warns against the risk of bit rot, he advises the need for digital vellum to counter the effects of bit rot.
What Is Bit Rot?
Bit rot is the slow degradation of digital data on a hard drive. It is a gradual corruption of files in a storage device due to an accumulation of values that are considered non-critical. It is essentially the inaccessibility of a file because it has become obsolete and there is no available compatible software to 'read' them. This is digital obsolescence. Due to the amount of data we are constantly surrounded with, and the many seemingly efficient ways of storing and retrieving them, we forget about things we do not foresee. What if in the centuries to come all the documents we have uploaded on the internet, all the emails we have sent and all the media messages aren't readable anymore? Our individual personalities would be lost, the idea of who we were, forgotten.
We recently chanced upon my grandfather's stash of research work. The man had meticulously stored a box in the attic which contained his research papers. He had been a frontline physicist working with his teammates on particle acceleration. That was a huge find for me, being a physics enthusiast myself. The box contained his old notes and a band of floppy disks. The notes, still intact and wreaking of vinegar, explicitly stated the team's progress, their strengths, and their weaknesses. There was, of course, no way to access the information in the 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk. The hardware was unavailable. And even if it were, there are chances that the storage format would be unreadable by the available software. Imagine what would happen to our own storage devices in the decades to come.
Digital obsolescence, therefore, has two forms: the hardware, and the software. While the former deals with the unavailability of the hardware to access the digital file because they had phased out, the latter concerns the inability to read the digital file by the available software because the original software had become obsolete. This is what Vint Cerf has been on about. This is what warranted the call for digital vellum.
What Is Digital Vellum?
Digital vellum is a system of storage that would ensure that digital information can still be interpreted centuries later.
In the archives of the town of Sandwich, England, sometime in 2014, there was an accidental find. Someone had discovered a rare 12th Century edition of King Edward the First's Magna Carta–a form of charter. The piece had been hidden in a scrapbook from the Victorian era. The copy of the charter was of course battered–torn in places and stained in others–but remained legible. The handwriting was still discernible, the layout was intact and the dates remained visible, making it possible for historians of the Magna Carta Project to confirm its authenticity.
This, thus, serves to remind the modern-day people of the relevance of long-term conservation of information in physical and print formats.
The concept of bit rot and digital vellum has, however, not gotten the amount of recognition and attention it deserves. This is because the illusion of immortality of internet-uploaded digital information still stands in our minds. The wholesome truth is that there is the ever-increasing danger that this information we would reassess would be unreadable in a couple of decades, talk more of what happens in hundreds or thousands of years. There would be a problem for future generations. The internet-uploaded information is, of course, subject to reconstruction as the tech giants like Google allow. There would be, therefore, no way to establish a standard of reality and truths about anyone or any place from these "googleable" information. The original, true information has, therefore, been "bit rotted" away.
Solutions To Bit Rot: Digital Vellum
The problem of digital degradation and inaccessibility of information can be corrected or prevented by borrowing a leaf from our last generations. They made use of more durable and simpler forms of information storage. Stones, sculptures, and art were used to give us information about what they were like. These "time capsules" survived over the ages to give us what we have as history today. The Rosetta Stone of the Ptolemaic era, discovered in 1799 was pivotal to understanding and research into ancient Egyptian history. A modern-day equivalent of this is the Georgia Guidestones–the American Stone Henge. These huge slabs of rock were inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization in a post-apocalyptic era. There are a set of 10 guidelines written in 12 languages, some ancient and some modern languages. Even some websites have gone as far as etching their entire archives on nickel plates that would remain durable for thousands of years.
There has also been the creation of standardized digital formats such as PDFs and JPEGs. These formats would remain readable for a very long time. There is even a fluidity of software developers, making it possible for a file to be readable irrespective of the developer. There is a problem, however, because the companies that own such standards may liquidate and the files become inaccessible or they may decide to prevent access to old documents or even monetize user access. These may not happen in the very foreseeable future but the risk is ever-present.
There is ongoing research at the Carniege Mellon University in Pittsburgh, led by Mahadev Satyanarayanan on the "Olive" project. This research entails capturing a list of all available programs and operating systems on which they run. The programs can be opened on a "virtual machine", a software that copies the operating system on which the original digital information runs. This means that in centuries to come, one would still be able to open a document from Microsoft Windows 9. This would be the ultimate type of digital vellum!
We need to take proactive measures to secure our digital legacy and preserve what has become our digitized lives. If we do not, we face the risk of being, like the information in my grandfather's floppy disks, lost to the ages to come and swept under the carpet of bit rot.