[TUHS] Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

Actually I like this fork.  I'm curious, do you know what is best practice
for keeping bits around these days?

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 01:42:17PM -0800, Tom Perrine wrote:
> A tiny bit of a fork, but...
> 
> When I was at SDSC.EDU we did a project for the National Archives. Gotta
> love an agency that's mission is "data for the lifetime of the Republic"...
> 
> They wanted to be sure that they could still access data at least 100 years
> later, even assuming that no one had accessed it in that 100 year period.
> 
> Anyway, we looked at all the options at the time (very early 2000s).
> 
> While media lifetime was indeed understood to be critical, we specifically
> called out needing to retain the software and the encryption keys. AND the
> encryption algorithms!
> At that time, media encryption was still quite new, and they hadn't
> considered that issue. At all.
> 
> Overall, the best, most practical approach (at that time) was to
> periodically copy the data forward, into new media, into new
> storage software, and decrypting with the old keys and algos, and
> re-encrypting with new.
> 
> Only by doing this periodically, we argued, could they really be sure of
> being able to recover data 100+ years from now.
> 
> Don't get me started on the degradation of early generation optical media
> that was guaranteed for 50 years, but rusted internally within 2 years.
> 
> And of course now there are companies that specialize in providing
> mothballed obsolete tape and other readers.
> 
> --tep
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 6:55 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 
> > When I worked in the intelligience industry, the government spent a lot
> > of money tasking someone (I think it was Kodak) to determine the best
> > media for archival storage.    It included traditional 6250 9 track
> > tapes and the then-popular exabyte 8mm (which was atrociously short
> > lived).   I pointed out that magnetic storage was probably always going
> > to be problematic and things needed ???digital refresh??? if you really
> > wanted to keep them.
> >
> >
> > If you know the tape may be problematic when played back, there are
> > things you can do.    I was gifted the master tapes of one of the radio
> > shows originated at WJHU in the 70???s.   I had them sent out to a company
> > who ???baked??? them, but then they also had to redo all the splices on them
> > when they were played back.
> >

-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat