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  Anonymous Coward, 23 Feb 2015 @ 6:15pm

  
  

  "Maybe someday all of NASA's tweets will be safely stored on magnetic tape, and SpaceX's first reusable rocket landing video will be preserved in HD."
  
  First of all, magnetic tape does not exactly "safely" store things; it degrades over time. And it's very naïve to think that even without the near-certainty of data degradation, digital media will preserve things as well as the typewriter and film did. Digital formats as well as the physical media they're written on tend to become obsolete rather quickly. A huge amount of information and history from the early digital age has already been lost this way.
  
  And we can be sure that things are worse today than when the NY Times 1990 article "Lost on Earth: Wealth of Data Found in Space" was written:
  
  

  Even tapes in good condition may be missing the documents needed to decode them. Others are so old that computer experts no longer understand how they were programmed. Still others can be processed only on machinery so outdated that little of the necessary hardware remains.
  
  Two years ago, for example, Eric Eliason of the United States Geological Survey learned that more than 3,000 images from the Viking mission to Mars, obtained in the late 1970's, had never been processed from the master data record, the unprocessed data transmitted from the spacecraft.
  
  After tracking down the data, Mr. Eliason looked up the NASA documents that described how theywere entered. ''It was written in technical jargon,'' he said. ''Maybe it was clear to the person who wrote it but it was not clear to me 20 years later.''
  
  There were copies of some old computer programs used to turn the raw data into pictures, he said, but the source codes the computer needed to run the programs could not be found and the computers themselves no longer existed.

  
  
  http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/20/science/lost-on-earth-wealth-of-data-found-in-space.html

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• 

  John Fenderson (profile), 24 Feb 2015 @ 9:21am

  
  

  Wait a second

  There were copies of some old computer programs used to turn the raw data into pictures, he said, but the source codes the computer needed to run the programs could not be found and the computers themselves no longer existed.

  
  
  The lack of source code and the lack of hardware should not be a complete stumper at all. It increases the amount of work needed, but reverse engineering binaries that were compiled for systems that no longer exist is totally a thing that can be done.

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  • 

    Anonymous Coward, 24 Feb 2015 @ 10:54am

    
    

    Re: Wait a second

    Not a 'complete stumper' but the question will always be, how much will this restoration cost, and is it worth it? One challenge is reading old data from a magnetic, optical, or NVM storage medium when you lack the hardware required to read it. Reverse-engineering hardware (or even building it from specs) is hardly a trivial task.
    
    Many of us might face this very issue throughout our lives. Like, "How do I get the pictures off my no-longer-working no-name Taiwanese digital camera I bought over 20 years ago?"

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      John Fenderson (profile), 24 Feb 2015 @ 11:04am

      
      

      Re: Re: Wait a second

      I was speaking to the issue of reverse-engineering binaries specifically. I never claimed that it was a trivial thing to do. But it doesn't have to be expensive! Off the top of my head, I know four qualified engineers who would enjoy doing that work as a fun side-project for little or no charge (for the right organization, anyway).
      
      "Many of us might face this very issue throughout our lives. Like, "How do I get the pictures off my no-longer-working no-name Taiwanese digital camera I bought over 20 years ago?""
      
      I've encountered the same issue both personally and professionally for almost my entire career, with media written by equipment far older than that!

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      • 

        Anonymous Coward, 24 Feb 2015 @ 12:01pm

        
        

        Re: Re: Re: Wait a second

        It's funny that the really old stuff often isn't as hard to deal with. Like punch cards, paper tape, and electronics from the IBM era. It's the more recent stuff that can get tricky, especially whenever a new technology emerges. That's when many companies enter the field, and most of them fail, taking their proprietary formats with them. It happened with micro-computers (do people still call them that anymore?), CAD, digital cameras, and a host of other proprietary closed-format products that left consumers out to dry when the company folded, merged, or -- like Sony-- just felt like leaving its customers stranded and therefore forced to upgrade.
        
        After being burned repeatedly by 'betting on the wrong horse', I've decided it's usually best to wait a few years (at least) after something new comes out before investing in any kind of expensive purchase, to minimize the chance of being left with an orphan technology, format, or company.

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          John Fenderson (profile), 24 Feb 2015 @ 2:27pm

          
          

          Re: Re: Re: Re: Wait a second

          "to minimize the chance of being left with an orphan technology, format, or company."
          
          Yes, you should not be storing data in proprietary data formats and should avoid any devices that insist that you do. Or, if that's impossible, export and convert that data to a standard format regularly.

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