Over a year ago, David Pogue, tech columnist for The New York Times, published an article titled "Should you worry about data rot?"

Occasionally I take the article out and read it—and get an anxiety attack.

Pogue's article included an interview with Dag Spicer, the curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Data rot, according to Spicer, deals with problems that occur to the medium on which information is stored. Time, temperature, humidity, storage in moldy basements and such can make information difficult to read.

Finding machines to read the data is a problem. Think of the eight-track tape player. I ran into some eight-track cartridges in a box in my basement not long ago. The problem is that I no longer own the player. Do you know anyone who does?

VHS tapes are gradually going by the wayside, and a lot of folks are transferring their VHS to CD or DVD, thinking, "Well that fixes it." But it won't be long before VHS players start disappearing, and if you haven't backed your videos up to the newer formats you may very well lose everything.

Think of the floppy disk. Once floppies were everywhere. Not long ago, I started cleaning out the files in my office and I'll bet I threw away a thousand of them. Spicer said that if Moses had gotten the Ten Commandments on a floppy disk, they would never have made it to today.

A lot of people think that when they transfer their old VHS movies to DVD they are finished. What makes them think that DVD, or any digital files, will not also be replaced? I once had a wire recorder and a Dictaphone machine in my office. Holy cow! They have totally vanished!

Nobody is thinking about permanent preservation of records, and that is because money is made by getting you to buy the latest format and the newest gadget. As far as I know, no one is stockpiling those old machines and keeping them in running order. And is anyone trying to create a permanent storage medium? Well, how can it be permanent when no one knows what the next technological advancement will be?
Spicer is of the opinion that the best long-range recording medium is paper. Some paper documents have lasted thousands of years. I read a book recently about a project that involved deciphering a book that held some of the writing of Archimedes, who died in 218 BC. Documents written on the walls of Egyptian tombs have also survived.
All your personal family data represents your personal memory. Without it, you don't exist. All those pictures and movies, recordings and jokes, and family memories are your personality and your family's personality. How are you going to preserve it?

I remember reading Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius, in which the Emperor of Rome is writing his memoirs about the lives of the Julian Caesars and worrying about how all his work will be preserved. Finally he decides to just leave it lying around in some inconspicuous place. Many of the ancient books of his time had survived in just that way.

Still, that is pretty informal and pretty chancy. The manufacturers are contributing to the problem because they want to sell you new hard drives every two to five years. And the systems that operate them also change regularly. If you are not updating your equipment, you are falling behind and you risk becoming obsolete—or at least the equipment you are using will not contribute to long-term preservation.
I cannot tell you how often I have had older adults contact me for help in finding a way to watch the latest movie e-mailed to them from their children's modern computer, and which they cannot open because their equipment or their software is obsolete.

And with some digital media, like a CD, errors often are not recoverable. The data is just lost. All that information is gone, whisked away as if it never existed.

No one really knows how long a CD or DVD will last. It could be five years or a hundred years. DVDs are already obsolete, because we now have Blu-Ray, and that's not the end, either.

So, what can you do about data rot? I wish I knew. One thing is certain: You have to take responsibility for it. No one is going to do it for you.

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