Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, Diamond executive producer with I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: how the tech are yet. You know, I thought it
Speaker 1: might be interesting to talk about how data can both
Speaker 1: be easy to lose and hard to lose. It's a paradox,
Speaker 1: but really this is all about the media upon which
Speaker 1: we store data and how that media can pose various challenges. Now,
Speaker 1: first up, let's just talk about the concept of obsolescence.
Speaker 1: So as our technology, our language, our culture, as all
Speaker 1: these things evolve and we discover new ways to commit
Speaker 1: information to different types of media, we often leave the
Speaker 1: older methods behind. For example, very few people are recording
Speaker 1: audio to wax cylinders today. For example, you know, Thomas
Speaker 1: Edison did it, but you don't see people doing it now,
Speaker 1: at least not outside of you know, historical demonstrations and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. The days of storing info magnetically
Speaker 1: onto strips of metal, like we saw at the end
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, that's pretty far behind us too,
Speaker 1: although magnetic tape is built on the same principle. But
Speaker 1: before we use tape, we used wire um, not that frequently,
Speaker 1: but it was one of those things that kind of
Speaker 1: paved the way toward magnetic tape. Now, over time, all
Speaker 1: media will ultimately go obsolete, either because the stuff we
Speaker 1: recorded upon has worn out, the actual physical stuff has broken,
Speaker 1: or because we've lost the ability to retrieve information from
Speaker 1: that type of media. And that inability to retrieve can
Speaker 1: range from the technical to just our knowledge of how
Speaker 1: to do it. So let's take a moment to consider
Speaker 1: something that is pretty far removed from modern technology unless
Speaker 1: you watch stargate, and that is hieroglyphs. So thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago, the people of ancient Egypt developed a writing
Speaker 1: system that was complicated, to say the least. So our
Speaker 1: Latin alphabet, the one that we use in in English,
Speaker 1: for example, has twenty six characters, right, twenty six letters
Speaker 1: in the alphabet, and hieroglyphs had hundreds of characters, like
Speaker 1: a thousand or more. Now, some of the characters in
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt represented basic phonemes. Phonemes are sounds within a language, right,
Speaker 1: like would be a phoneme or like these are basic sounds.
Speaker 1: But other characters in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs they represented entire words,
Speaker 1: or at least parts of words. Uh. Some represented still bles,
Speaker 1: so not necessarily parts of words like you would think,
Speaker 1: but a syllable that was common in ancient Egypt. But
Speaker 1: over the millennia, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs
Speaker 1: faded from Egyptian culture. There were a lot of reasons
Speaker 1: for this, I mean, the the style of writing down
Speaker 1: information changed from hieroglyphs to like demonic writing, and beyond also,
Speaker 1: you had folks like you know, Europeans, like Greeks and
Speaker 1: Romans who were invading Egypt and changing things and disrupting
Speaker 1: Egyptian culture significantly. By the time we got a few
Speaker 1: centuries into the common era, pretty much no one knew
Speaker 1: how to read the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt anymore. So
Speaker 1: we had all this knowledge stored in various places and
Speaker 1: no way to retrieve that knowledge. It appeared as though
Speaker 1: we had lost all of it, or that we had,
Speaker 1: due to some misconceptions, completely miss interpreted that knowledge. So
Speaker 1: by the time we got into the medieval era, there
Speaker 1: was this prevailing hypothesis that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were symbolic
Speaker 1: in meaning and by that I mean that the images
Speaker 1: that the Egyptians used were thought of to be direct
Speaker 1: symbols of whatever the message was. So let's say you
Speaker 1: had images of a boat and a snake, then you
Speaker 1: might be led to think that what you're looking at
Speaker 1: must be an allegorical story about snakes on a boat,
Speaker 1: possibly starring Samuel L. Jackson. But no, the symbols used
Speaker 1: weren't meant to represent exactly what they looked like. They
Speaker 1: represented elements of a language. So for example, if you
Speaker 1: want to understand what I'm saying, our letter S looks
Speaker 1: kind of like a snake, right, but it doesn't mean snake.
Speaker 1: When you see the letter S, that doesn't mean snake. Uh.
Speaker 1: It could be the beginning of the word snake. Obviously
Speaker 1: that begins with S, but it could mean anything. It
Speaker 1: represents the S sound, which is found in lots of words,
Speaker 1: not just snake. And the hieroglyphs were similar, but no
Speaker 1: one had a document that matched hieroglyphs to some other
Speaker 1: known language so that someone could actually decipher the symbols.
Speaker 1: So it just seemed to be, you know, all these
Speaker 1: icons that the meaning had been completely lost. But then
Speaker 1: came Napoleon Bonaparte and his armies invaded Egypt toward the
Speaker 1: end of the eighteenth century, and in the process the
Speaker 1: armies happened across something incredibly important, and it would later
Speaker 1: be called the Rosetta Stone. Now, the Rosetta Stone itself
Speaker 1: is a type of monument, and there are carvings on
Speaker 1: the monument that represent an official dynastic decree. The carvings
Speaker 1: are in three different written languages. So at the base
Speaker 1: of the monument you have the carving in ancient Greek,
Speaker 1: above that is Demotic, that is an Egyptian language that
Speaker 1: followed the hieroglyphic language, and at the top are hieroglyphs.
Speaker 1: And since all three carvings represented the same decree, this
Speaker 1: gave experts the opportunity to finally begin deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs,
Speaker 1: and so began the long process of uncovering lost knowledge.
Speaker 1: And this was helped by subsequent discoveries of similar decrees,
Speaker 1: so that we over time we're able to understand what
Speaker 1: these these hieroglyphs actually stood for. We understood that it
Speaker 1: was a written language that wasn't just purely symbolic. Now,
Speaker 1: my point in telling the story is that we have
Speaker 1: to remind ourselves that while we have ways to record knowledge,
Speaker 1: it would be foolish for us to assume that any
Speaker 1: way that we use is permanent, because we've got plenty
Speaker 1: of examples of knowledge being lost in the past, whether
Speaker 1: it's because people forgot how to access that knowledge, or
Speaker 1: maybe the knowledge was based in folklore and the people
Speaker 1: that were the stewards of that knowledge were wiped out
Speaker 1: or assimilated and the knowledge was lost, or maybe the
Speaker 1: physical copies, if it was like a written language, maybe
Speaker 1: the physical copies were lost. And shout out to the
Speaker 1: late Great Library of Alexandria, which I should add kind
Speaker 1: of faded away, not just because of the famous fire
Speaker 1: set by Julius Caesar's forces, though that clearly was a
Speaker 1: catastrophic event, but also there was a long period in
Speaker 1: which leaders were cracking down on scholars because well, a
Speaker 1: little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a lot of
Speaker 1: knowledge has got to be absolutely deadly right. But anyway,
Speaker 1: let's skip ahead to the modern era. So even today
Speaker 1: we run the risk of losing access to information because
Speaker 1: we no longer make the stuff, what plays the media
Speaker 1: that we used in the old days, or at least
Speaker 1: in many cases, it is getting really tricky to track
Speaker 1: down the components that can retrieve data from those types
Speaker 1: of media. Right, you might be able to find old
Speaker 1: working equipment that can access certain types of stuff that
Speaker 1: otherwise we no longer can access, but it's it's rare
Speaker 1: that you're gonna find someone make a new version of that.
Speaker 1: It's not impossible. It's not like we've lost all ability
Speaker 1: to It's just that unless there is a pressing financial
Speaker 1: benefit to creating that kind of stuff, no one's gonna
Speaker 1: bother to do it. Because you know, it's expensive to
Speaker 1: produce older types of of technologies, and unless there's a
Speaker 1: financial incentive, no one's gonna do it. Um, it's sad
Speaker 1: to say so. There's also the danger that the media
Speaker 1: we rely upon could wear out and deteriorate over time. So,
Speaker 1: for example, let's consider celluloid or film. Cinematic film degrades
Speaker 1: over time, particularly if it's in a hot and moist environment.
Speaker 1: And you might have heard about some filmmakers storing prints
Speaker 1: of their movies or masters of their movies in old
Speaker 1: salt mines such as the one that's below Hutchinson, Kansas
Speaker 1: in the United States. These subterranean spaces maintain a constant
Speaker 1: temperature of around sixty eight fahrenheit or twenty celsius, and
Speaker 1: they have a low humidity somewhere between like forty humidity.
Speaker 1: Of course, movies are not the only thing stored in
Speaker 1: those minds that in fact, we got the idea because
Speaker 1: of the story of the monument men who ended up
Speaker 1: finding lots of stolen art from various parts of Europe
Speaker 1: that the Nazis had collected and stored in salt mines.
Speaker 1: We ended up kind of using the same idea. So,
Speaker 1: because it's a great way to preserve stuff, if you
Speaker 1: otherwise it's in danger of deterioration. Also, we have to
Speaker 1: acknowledge that while it's a great way to preserve stuff,
Speaker 1: there's a tragedy year because we're also removing it right
Speaker 1: from us. You know, we're storing it and we're preserving it,
Speaker 1: but to what end if you can't access it, then
Speaker 1: it doesn't really like there's a lot of questions. There
Speaker 1: are philosophical questions. If you have a priceless work of
Speaker 1: art stored an assault mine and no one can go there,
Speaker 1: is it the same as not having it at all?
Speaker 1: Now in the case of film. A lot of studios
Speaker 1: will actually use those master recordings when they want to
Speaker 1: do a remastered version of the film they want to
Speaker 1: release it on, say like Blu ray or something, they'll
Speaker 1: go to the the original print that's stored in a
Speaker 1: salt mine and they'll pull from that. But yeah, there's
Speaker 1: lots of other stuff besides just film down there, anything
Speaker 1: that needs a controlled environment in order to stop or
Speaker 1: at least slow deterioration. Now, magnetic tape is another important
Speaker 1: storage method, and we've been using magnetic tape as storage
Speaker 1: since the mid twenty century, around nine or so, and
Speaker 1: again the basic principle behind it dates back to the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century. That was when we were using magnetic wire.
Speaker 1: But whether it's real to real tape, or cassettes or
Speaker 1: VHS tapes, we've relied on this methodology to store all
Speaker 1: sorts of information, from you know, computer information to music
Speaker 1: in the case of like the cassette tapes of the
Speaker 1: eighties nineties or the VHS video tapes, all sorts of
Speaker 1: info we have committed to magnetic tape, and a lot
Speaker 1: of companies still rely on magnetic tape for long term
Speaker 1: storage and backups. When I use long term storage. I'm
Speaker 1: speaking relatively, as we will see now, some older forms
Speaker 1: of magnetic tape are largely obsolete because the devices we'd
Speaker 1: use to read the data from them are out of production.
Speaker 1: You might find a working device here or there, but
Speaker 1: they can be pretty rare, and being mechanical in nature,
Speaker 1: they will eventually require maintenance or they'll stop working. And
Speaker 1: when you're talking about this kind of stuff, often you're
Speaker 1: talking about things that have parts that no one's making anymore.
Speaker 1: So it becomes very challenging to keep them in good
Speaker 1: working order because there's a limited supply of components you
Speaker 1: can use to make replacements when something breaks down. On
Speaker 1: top of all that, magnetic information itself can degrade over time,
Speaker 1: actually can degrade really quickly if it's in the presence
Speaker 1: of a strong magnetic field, which is why as a
Speaker 1: kid I was told never to bring a magnet close
Speaker 1: to a computer or computer disks because you could actually
Speaker 1: uh corrupt information that's stored on those those devices, because
Speaker 1: the magnet would realign the magnetic components that were on
Speaker 1: this plastic film or in the case of a computer,
Speaker 1: uh arraid on a platter inside the hard disk drive. Now,
Speaker 1: on average if stored in decent conditions, magnetic tape typically
Speaker 1: will retained data from anywhere between ten to twenty years.
Speaker 1: When stored in prime conditions like in that salt mine,
Speaker 1: for example, you might stretch it to around thirty years.
Speaker 1: So magnetic tape can hold onto data for a while,
Speaker 1: but certainly not indefinitely. It will sooner or later degrade
Speaker 1: to a point where the the information will be corrupted
Speaker 1: or irretrievable. Now, on a similar note, let's talk floppy disks.
Speaker 1: So when I was a kid, our Apple to E
Speaker 1: computer had a five and a quarter inch floppy disk drive.
Speaker 1: These were not the first floppy discs. There were older ones.
Speaker 1: There were larger ones. IBM created eight inch floppy disks
Speaker 1: for example, And the disks that I was familiar with
Speaker 1: back when I was using the Apple to E were
Speaker 1: these plastic envelopes, and the envelopes were covering a disc
Speaker 1: of magnetic film on the inside, and it was on
Speaker 1: this magnetic disc that you could save and retreat data.
Speaker 1: And I actually had to look this up because I
Speaker 1: could not remember it myself, but the original five and
Speaker 1: a quarter inch floppy disks could hold up to nine
Speaker 1: bytes of data. That's when they were first created, so
Speaker 1: that's just ninety kilobytes. But over time, you know, engineers
Speaker 1: improved the technology. They increased the capacity of floppy disks. Typically,
Speaker 1: they did this by creating more precise read write heads
Speaker 1: so they could store data in smaller physical sizes, which
Speaker 1: meant you could cram more of it onto the same
Speaker 1: sized disc. They also figured out how to multilayer discs,
Speaker 1: so that increased storage as well. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: some disks maxed out at around so significantly more than
Speaker 1: ninety but still weigh less than what we use today.
Speaker 1: Now I'm gonna talk more about floppy disks and other
Speaker 1: forms of storage and why all these different types kind
Speaker 1: of a limited shelf life of one span or another.
Speaker 1: But before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we were talking about floppy discs. Well,
Speaker 1: my parents write novels, and so my dad's first books,
Speaker 1: which were written in the early eighties, they were written
Speaker 1: on that old Apple to E computer, and he would
Speaker 1: save chapters of his books too floppy disks. Each novel
Speaker 1: would take up several discs, like I don't know, around
Speaker 1: a dozen or so. I can't quite remember I remember
Speaker 1: we had disc holders that would hold like maybe three
Speaker 1: of his novels, because that's how many discs would be
Speaker 1: taken up just by you know, storing chapters onto them.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if he actually still owns those floppy discs,
Speaker 1: but I imagine that even if he does, he doesn't
Speaker 1: have any way to check and see if the data
Speaker 1: is still there or not. He would need an Apple
Speaker 1: to E or an emulator to simulate an Apple to
Speaker 1: E on another machine. Plus he would have to have
Speaker 1: a floppy disk drive connected to whatever computer he was
Speaker 1: using in order to try and read those disks. And
Speaker 1: floppy disk drives are not completely gone. They you can
Speaker 1: still find them. They are increasingly rare, however, so it's
Speaker 1: easy to imagine that a day will come when anything
Speaker 1: stored on disks like that, like my dad's books, will
Speaker 1: just become lost simply because no one makes the stuff
Speaker 1: capable of reading it anymore. And the stuff that already
Speaker 1: exists will eventually break down. Um and you know, the
Speaker 1: the actual magnetic information on the discs will degrade over
Speaker 1: time to just like with magnetic tape. The eventually you'll
Speaker 1: you'll have some of those magnetic particles move out of alignment.
Speaker 1: That's going to corrupt your data. I know, I keep
Speaker 1: saying data and data. I know I do that. I
Speaker 1: don't know why do that, and I can't predict when
Speaker 1: it happens. It just does. I apologize for it though,
Speaker 1: because I know it drives some of you crazy, and
Speaker 1: my apologies. It just happens anyway, Those particles will move
Speaker 1: out of alignment, the information gets corrupted. So yeah, switch
Speaker 1: to information there, and then you can't retrieve it anymore.
Speaker 1: So that can happen to even if you have a
Speaker 1: working computer system that could theoretically pull that information off
Speaker 1: the disk. Sometimes the information on the disc itself will
Speaker 1: become corrupt. Now, we also have to keep in mind
Speaker 1: that media that we still use today because hardly. I mean,
Speaker 1: people do still use floppy disks depending on the situation,
Speaker 1: but it's pretty rare. But even the stuff that we
Speaker 1: do use today, eventually that's gonna become obsolete too. Just
Speaker 1: a few years ago, compact discs were the go to
Speaker 1: for data storage, at least for personal computers, though a
Speaker 1: lot of enterprises would continue to rely on magnetic tape
Speaker 1: for more long term backups, and compact discs are a
Speaker 1: type of optical storage, meaning that rather than using magnetism
Speaker 1: to align tiny particles on a physical surface, we're using
Speaker 1: lasers to write and to read from these disks. UH,
Speaker 1: the information is stored in water called pits and lands,
Speaker 1: pits being designated pit in the surface, and lands being
Speaker 1: the spaces between PITSU. The rewriteable CD is actually kind
Speaker 1: of use foggy and clear UH sections that are very
Speaker 1: very tiny. You wouldn't be able to see them with
Speaker 1: the naked eye. Now, compact discs allow us to create
Speaker 1: a more dense storage system, so we could put way
Speaker 1: more information on a single CD than we could with
Speaker 1: stuff like floppy disks. Now, unlike cassettes and floppy disks,
Speaker 1: optical discs are not affected by magnetism. So if you
Speaker 1: did bring a powerful magnet close to a bunch of
Speaker 1: floppy disks or cassette tapes or anything that uses magnetic storage,
Speaker 1: you would scramble the information on there because the powerful
Speaker 1: magnet would realign the magnetic particles that are on the tape.
Speaker 1: But optical discs don't have magnetic particles, so they would
Speaker 1: be immune to that kind of interference. However, this does
Speaker 1: not mean that optical discs last forever, so the there
Speaker 1: are many layers on a compact disc. Same thing with
Speaker 1: DVDs and blue race, by the way, there are several
Speaker 1: layers involved, and these layers can have chemical reactions in them,
Speaker 1: and those chemical reactions can cause those layers to degrade
Speaker 1: over time. So like a CD that's stored in a
Speaker 1: very humid and warm place, like if people had stored
Speaker 1: their CDs, their music CDs inside their car in the
Speaker 1: summer and Georgia, they might find that those CDs don't
Speaker 1: last that long, like they might last a few seasons,
Speaker 1: but eventually they degrade and they you know, if you're
Speaker 1: in a hot and humid environment, then disc is going
Speaker 1: to degrade faster, not like instantaneously, but it will start
Speaker 1: to degrade faster than it would if you stored it
Speaker 1: in a cooler, dry place. And that outer layer on
Speaker 1: a CD, that's the clear layer, right, it's protective and
Speaker 1: it's clear so that a laser can go through it.
Speaker 1: But sometimes that clear layer can start to rot away
Speaker 1: and it can leave the reflective layer that's underneath it exposed.
Speaker 1: And with some CDs, that reflective layer is made up
Speaker 1: of a silver or sometimes a silver compound and silver
Speaker 1: when exposed to air will tarnish. The tarnished silver won't
Speaker 1: reflect a laser properly, and so you start to get
Speaker 1: errors when you're trying to read information off of that
Speaker 1: kind of c D. Now, not all CDs were made
Speaker 1: that way, right, so only some CDs have this particular
Speaker 1: bronzing issue. In fact, our research group determined that the
Speaker 1: c ds that really have this specific problem we're all
Speaker 1: pressed in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, between the year's nineteen eight
Speaker 1: and nineteen nine D three. That's pretty darn specific. Now.
Speaker 1: The issue here, though, is that there's really no way
Speaker 1: to give an average lifespan for a compact disc because
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as an average compact discs. There
Speaker 1: were there were so many different manufacturing and pressing processes
Speaker 1: and recording processes that different ones could last a different
Speaker 1: you know, theoretical maximum amount of time. So we can't
Speaker 1: really answer the question how long on average will a
Speaker 1: s c D last. I've seen a lot of people
Speaker 1: suggest five to ten years, some people saying ten to twenty,
Speaker 1: some people going as far as fifty. I think it
Speaker 1: really depends on the way the CD was made and
Speaker 1: what storage facility it's in, Like, is it in a
Speaker 1: house where it's kept out of sunlight because UV radiation
Speaker 1: can affect c D suh. Is it kept cool and dry,
Speaker 1: then it's gonna last longer. Is it not handled a lot?
Speaker 1: Like if it's your favorite music CD and you handle
Speaker 1: it a lot, then it's gonna degrade faster. Again, not instantaneously,
Speaker 1: and it may not even be noticeable at first, but
Speaker 1: eventually you might get the things where it starts to
Speaker 1: skip on a certain track, or it won't even play
Speaker 1: certain tracks. That will happen over time. It's a similar
Speaker 1: story for other optical formats, which include you know, DVDs
Speaker 1: and Blu ray discs. These two have a limited lifespan,
Speaker 1: though that lifespan may stretch to as long as a
Speaker 1: century under ideal conditions. In a century is a long
Speaker 1: time for a single person, right, I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: a significant amount of time. However, if we step outside
Speaker 1: of a humans lifespan and we look at it from
Speaker 1: the perspective of, you know, a historical account, then a
Speaker 1: hundred years is not long at all. I mean, imagine
Speaker 1: for a moment, if you had no access to any
Speaker 1: information that was recorded before nineteen twenty because all the
Speaker 1: media that we had used to record info on had
Speaker 1: fallen apart or was otherwise unusable or inaccessible, that nothing
Speaker 1: before nineteen twenty two would be knowable apart from what
Speaker 1: people wrote about those times post nineteen two. That would
Speaker 1: be crazy, right, But that's the kind of situation we're
Speaker 1: in when we start looking at digital information. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: what about we look at like hard drives, hard disk
Speaker 1: drives and solid state drives, you know, the stuff that's
Speaker 1: in your computer systems, your smartphones, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: What what do they have? You know, how long will
Speaker 1: information last in those? Well, they stored information in different ways.
Speaker 1: Hard disk drives have one or more platters in them,
Speaker 1: and each platter has a magnetic coding on it upon
Speaker 1: which information can be stored. So, just like cassettes and
Speaker 1: floppy disks and other magnetic storage methods, hard disk drives
Speaker 1: can be affected by powerful magnetic fields because they too,
Speaker 1: store information magnetically. Hard disk drives have moving parts, so
Speaker 1: the platters spin quite quite quickly in fact, and an
Speaker 1: actuator mechanical arm with a ReadWrite quote unquote head on it.
Speaker 1: This is the bit that either can read the magnetic
Speaker 1: particles that are stored on a platter, or it can
Speaker 1: actually exert a magnetic field that aligns the particles. When
Speaker 1: you're writing information on the platter, it moves across the
Speaker 1: platter and it starts to retrieve or right information to
Speaker 1: the disc itself. And because we're talking about moving parts here,
Speaker 1: stuff can and does wear down over time and use.
Speaker 1: If it gets a lot of use, it wears out
Speaker 1: more quickly. Also, it means that you should be gentle
Speaker 1: when you're moving anything that happens to have a hard
Speaker 1: disk drive inside of it, because a good whack and
Speaker 1: damage the delicate parts. If you knock that actuator arm
Speaker 1: out of alignment, that's a big problem. It's it's going
Speaker 1: to be impossible to read or write stuff reliably to
Speaker 1: that hard disk drive. Now, hard drives don't tend to
Speaker 1: last very long because of those mechanical parts. I've seen
Speaker 1: estimates of the lifespan for hard disk drives lasting somewhere
Speaker 1: between three two maybe six and a half years, seven years.
Speaker 1: Some give it a little bit longer, some a little
Speaker 1: bit shorter. Of course, a hard disk drive can last
Speaker 1: longer than a decade, but that's you know, if we're
Speaker 1: looking at typical use and we're looking at the average
Speaker 1: lifespan of hard disk drives, we tend to fall on
Speaker 1: that three to seven year range. So your mileage may vary.
Speaker 1: It may depend upon how you use your hard disk
Speaker 1: drive and the setting that you're in. So they will
Speaker 1: eventually break down. Also, even if they don't down sooner
Speaker 1: or later, really later, that magnetic information will start to
Speaker 1: move out of alignment just naturally. And so even if
Speaker 1: you were to preserve a hard disk drive perfectly and
Speaker 1: come back to it in a century, chances are a
Speaker 1: lot of the information would no longer be accessible because
Speaker 1: the actual magnetic particles would no longer be in the
Speaker 1: proper alignment. Solid state drives store information in a totally
Speaker 1: different way from hard disk drives, So instead of aligning
Speaker 1: magnetic particles, and ss D stores information through flash memory
Speaker 1: similar to USB sticks and other types of flash drives.
Speaker 1: These drives store information using nanned flash that's in a
Speaker 1: n D and that in turn is composed of what
Speaker 1: are called floating gate transistors. And all of this gets
Speaker 1: super technical, but let's just kind of imagine it this way.
Speaker 1: Each floating gate can be either charged, which means it's
Speaker 1: a zero, or it could be non charged, which means
Speaker 1: it's a one. So it gets a little bit confusing
Speaker 1: because we often think of binary with zero being off
Speaker 1: and one being on. But in this case, zero means
Speaker 1: that there is a charge in a cell and one
Speaker 1: means there is no charge in that cell, and a
Speaker 1: drive is made up of a grid of these cells.
Speaker 1: So USB flash drives and s s d s are
Speaker 1: non volatile memory. That means that they retain information even
Speaker 1: if they are not receiving power. Right, So, if you
Speaker 1: were to turn off your computer and it has an
Speaker 1: SSD drive in it, you didn't just wipe out everything
Speaker 1: that was stored on that SSD. It remains there. However,
Speaker 1: if an S s D goes without power for an
Speaker 1: extended period, so we're talking like five to ten years here,
Speaker 1: it can experience what is called bit rot That is,
Speaker 1: some of those charged gates might lose their charge without
Speaker 1: access to power, and over time the information degrades. So
Speaker 1: s s d s are not immune to deterioration either.
Speaker 1: You know, given enough time, the information on those will
Speaker 1: be corrupted as well. Without any other external forces being
Speaker 1: applied to the S s D s well, what about
Speaker 1: cloud storage, because that's changed everything, right. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: so much of the information that we use day to
Speaker 1: day that isn't even stored on our our native device
Speaker 1: at all, or what is stored in our native devices
Speaker 1: a temporary representation of that file. The actual file lives
Speaker 1: in the cloud. Well, assuming that the company that's providing
Speaker 1: the storage remains strong, data stored in the cloud tends
Speaker 1: to be pretty darn resilient. And that's because in order
Speaker 1: to provide a reputable cloud storage service, or really any
Speaker 1: cloud service, companies have to ensure redundancy. Now, that just
Speaker 1: means that any information that's stored to the cloud system
Speaker 1: has to be stored on multiple machines, because remember, cloud
Speaker 1: just means someone else's computer. That's really what the cloud is.
Speaker 1: When you're storing stuff in the cloud, it's not like
Speaker 1: just floating around in the Internet. It's being stored on
Speaker 1: servers that are part of some massive data server farm
Speaker 1: that are owned by some even more massive company like
Speaker 1: Amazon or Microsoft or Google. Now, the reason why these
Speaker 1: companies store the information on multiple machines is that should
Speaker 1: a single machine holding information malfunctions or I don't know,
Speaker 1: it goes on fire, or something. There are backups on
Speaker 1: other machines, so the customer ideally never even notices that
Speaker 1: there's any problem. There's no interruption of service, there's no delay,
Speaker 1: their information is still on quote unquote the cloud, when
Speaker 1: really it's on multiple machines. So this is important because
Speaker 1: most of these data server farm places, they're using really
Speaker 1: cheap components, like lots of them, but they're inexpensive and
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's just off the shelf inexpensive components
Speaker 1: to store all this information or to run processes. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's what allows them to have this kind of redundancy
Speaker 1: because they're not spending ridiculous amounts of money to get
Speaker 1: state of the art machines in there. They don't need that.
Speaker 1: They just need machines that are you know, more or
Speaker 1: less reliable and more importantly inexpensive, so that you can
Speaker 1: have lots of them so that you have backup. So
Speaker 1: in the background, these companies can replace broken or damage
Speaker 1: systems with newer ones. They can migrate copies of information
Speaker 1: onto new machines or existing machines, keep things going smoothly,
Speaker 1: and the customers never noticed an issue. Now there is
Speaker 1: a caveat there which I will get to after we
Speaker 1: come back from this break. So before the break, I
Speaker 1: alluded to a caveat about you know, having these indefinitely
Speaker 1: resilient data storage systems using the cloud, and that is
Speaker 1: I said at the beginning, assuming the company providing the
Speaker 1: storage remains strong. So we have to remember that much
Speaker 1: of cloud storage out there is resting in these few
Speaker 1: big companies, and they are really big and thus pretty
Speaker 1: resilient to change into going out of business, but they're
Speaker 1: not immune to it. Even companies like Amazon, Microsoft and
Speaker 1: Google have their vulnerabilities, and in fact, we're seeing increased
Speaker 1: pressure from around the world to break some of these
Speaker 1: companies up because they are so dominant in their respective spaces.
Speaker 1: So the odds of these companies going out of business
Speaker 1: are really really low, but they're not zero, or at
Speaker 1: least it's not zero that they won't be split up,
Speaker 1: and that ultimately that could lead to discontinuation of services
Speaker 1: in some areas. So we have to remember that the
Speaker 1: access to this information remains dependent upon these various companies
Speaker 1: staying in business and being capable of providing that service,
Speaker 1: so it's never a guarantee. So even the stuff that's
Speaker 1: saved in the cloud isn't necessarily permanent. It's probably it's
Speaker 1: probably in better shape than say, something that's saved on
Speaker 1: a magnet are magnetized tape that you keep in your
Speaker 1: your neodyne magnet room. It's going to be better than that,
Speaker 1: but it's not bulletproof. There are several other methods for
Speaker 1: storing information as well, including some that are, you know,
Speaker 1: fairly new. But the point remains our ability to hold
Speaker 1: onto knowledge depends upon the media we use uh and
Speaker 1: the machinery we used to access that media. And if
Speaker 1: we do not consistently information to new storage methods, we
Speaker 1: run the risk of losing the older information. UH. And
Speaker 1: I'll come back to that at the very end, But
Speaker 1: let's switch gears for a second, because sometimes we want
Speaker 1: to get rid of information. Sometimes we need to wipe
Speaker 1: some storage, you know, maybe we need to make room
Speaker 1: for something new. Anyone who's had a gaming PC, you've
Speaker 1: probably at some point said, all right, well, I gotta
Speaker 1: install a couple of these titles so that I can
Speaker 1: install the newest game I want to play. Or maybe
Speaker 1: we want to just get rid of something we no
Speaker 1: longer need or use, or maybe we need to get
Speaker 1: rid of something because we don't want someone else to
Speaker 1: see it. For example, let's say that you've upgraded to
Speaker 1: a brand new computer and you want to sell your
Speaker 1: old computer, or you're gonna donate it to like a
Speaker 1: school or something, or maybe you just want to recycle it. Well,
Speaker 1: chances are before you do that, you're going to want
Speaker 1: to wipe that computer clear of information first. If there's
Speaker 1: anything personal on computer, you probably don't want it falling
Speaker 1: into someone else's hands. Like let's say you get some
Speaker 1: financial or medical information that was stored somewhere on that machine,
Speaker 1: you definitely want to get that wiped off before you
Speaker 1: hand it over to someone else. Well, what happens when
Speaker 1: you delete data, Well, if you're using a computer and
Speaker 1: you're moving files to the recycled bin, that doesn't actually
Speaker 1: mean that the files are gone. Even emptying the recycled
Speaker 1: bin doesn't necessarily mean the files are gone. What it
Speaker 1: means is that the computer has essentially designated the respective
Speaker 1: parts on the storage system holding those files as being
Speaker 1: available for new information. So like the markers that would
Speaker 1: designate that as being a file or gone, but the
Speaker 1: file itself, the information of the file itself is still there.
Speaker 1: But then When it's time for you to save new
Speaker 1: information to your computer, some of that new information might
Speaker 1: be overwritten on top of the older files that you
Speaker 1: quote unquote de eated. So over time you will slowly
Speaker 1: eradicate the information of that deleted file as your computer
Speaker 1: rights new information to those segments. But it's not instantaneous.
Speaker 1: And the important thing to remember is that deleting a
Speaker 1: file doesn't mean the file is gone. It's not enough
Speaker 1: to just delete a file. Many operating systems include options
Speaker 1: to let you permanently delete files, and this option typically
Speaker 1: just involves overwriting the selected deleted files with information, usually
Speaker 1: garbage data that doesn't actually mean anything. The original file
Speaker 1: is gone and it's replaced with gibberish. But let's say
Speaker 1: you have to be absolutely certain that no one will
Speaker 1: ever retrieve information from your hard drive. Maybe this computer
Speaker 1: held crucial financial information for an important company, or maybe
Speaker 1: it held medical information for lots of people, and say
Speaker 1: like a hospital, and it's time for you to downgrade
Speaker 1: the system and get rid of it. Well, you're gonna
Speaker 1: really want to make sure that that machine is wiped clear.
Speaker 1: So then you might want to engage in what I
Speaker 1: would like to think of as the nuclear option. It's
Speaker 1: called the Gutman method, so Peter Gutman and Colin Plum
Speaker 1: came up with this process in the nineties. It involves
Speaker 1: overwriting a disk drive with gibberish thirty five times, using
Speaker 1: different patterns, including some that are not patterns but random passes.
Speaker 1: So there's no pattern at all. It's just a random
Speaker 1: overright pass followed by a whole bunch of patterned overrites
Speaker 1: followed by more random passes. Uh. And this is because
Speaker 1: even with your standard gibberish overwrite, it can still be
Speaker 1: possible for a determined person with the right tools to
Speaker 1: retrieve at least some information off of a hard drive. UM.
Speaker 1: This is because of that magnetic storage. We're talking about
Speaker 1: the hard disk drive era here, so we're really talking
Speaker 1: about looking for faint traces of magnetic imprints that could
Speaker 1: suggest what the original data saved on that hard disk
Speaker 1: drive was. Even by overwriting, those faint traces might remain.
Speaker 1: So this was Gutman's way of just obliterating any trace
Speaker 1: of what was there originally. So you really got to
Speaker 1: go to extremes, or at least you used to, because
Speaker 1: Gutman and Plumb were really concerned about that magnetic issue.
Speaker 1: These days, most experts suggest that the Gutman method is
Speaker 1: really overkill, especially if you're using a solid state drive,
Speaker 1: and that after three passes you're usually in pretty reliable
Speaker 1: shape and you don't have to worry about someone getting
Speaker 1: access to your information. There are also several software packages
Speaker 1: on the market that can go through the process of
Speaker 1: deleting files permanently, usually using some form of multi pass
Speaker 1: overwrite patterns multi pass meaning going over the entire storage drive,
Speaker 1: not like Lulu Dallas multi pass. Sometimes folks go to
Speaker 1: even further extremes, such as using powerful magnets to destroy
Speaker 1: you know, magnetic storage that happens where you know you're
Speaker 1: that will be part of the process. Some will even
Speaker 1: use shredders to destroy like hard disc platters and such,
Speaker 1: so that not only have the files been thoroughly deleted
Speaker 1: and overwritten, but the physical media itself has been physically destroyed.
Speaker 1: That's probably over a kill for most of us, unless
Speaker 1: you go by a three number designation like double oh
Speaker 1: nine or something. But it really is interesting to me
Speaker 1: that information can simultaneously be challenging to preserve and difficult
Speaker 1: to get rid of. But we're also talking about different
Speaker 1: time scales here, right, it's not apples to apples for preservation,
Speaker 1: We're really concerned about the long haul. How can we
Speaker 1: keep information accessible even as the way we generate, store,
Speaker 1: and retrieve information changes. How can we ensure that future
Speaker 1: generations will have access to the information that's at our
Speaker 1: disposal today. There are so many offshoots of this as well.
Speaker 1: For example, the desire to preserve old information is what
Speaker 1: drove the creators of the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator software
Speaker 1: or MAIM to do what they do. They wanted to
Speaker 1: create a way to preserve code that otherwise could fade
Speaker 1: into obscurity because these old arcade machines were physically coded
Speaker 1: onto chips that were part of these arcade cabinets, and
Speaker 1: over time more of those cabinets end up being destroyed
Speaker 1: or they become inoperable, and so this was an attempt
Speaker 1: to create a system that would preserve that code, to
Speaker 1: make it playable, not necessarily for people to play, but
Speaker 1: again to preserve the code itself, otherwise it would be lost.
Speaker 1: And as for destroying information, well that tends to be
Speaker 1: for short term requirements, right, Uh, if there's nothing that's
Speaker 1: threatening us or our information, Well, we could just play
Speaker 1: the waiting game, depending on how we've stored the information
Speaker 1: in the first place, because sooner or later the medium
Speaker 1: that the information is on will deteriorate or it'll go obsolete,
Speaker 1: and no one will be able to get the information anyway,
Speaker 1: including you. So if you don't, if you're not in
Speaker 1: a rush, you could just wait and the information will
Speaker 1: eventually no longer be accessible. Now related to these concepts,
Speaker 1: by the way, is the challenge of figuring out how
Speaker 1: to future proof messaging so that people far into the
Speaker 1: future will understand what those messages mean. Let's think back
Speaker 1: to the Egyptian example. Without the Rosetta stone, we would
Speaker 1: have no way of knowing what the higher glyphs mean.
Speaker 1: Not for sure, we could have a lot of hypotheses,
Speaker 1: but we wouldn't be able to really test them improve
Speaker 1: that our hypothesis is accurate. So let's take an example.
Speaker 1: Let's take the problem of nuclear waste from nuclear power facilities.
Speaker 1: So some nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: and we have to store it. We have to put
Speaker 1: it someplace where it's out of the way and safe.
Speaker 1: And it also means that any warnings that we put
Speaker 1: up at nuclear waste storage facilities really needs to be
Speaker 1: easy for future generations to interpret, even if they have
Speaker 1: lost all other records of what that site is. So
Speaker 1: the signage needs to convey displace is dangerous. But then,
Speaker 1: as that hieroglyphs example showed us, this is easier said
Speaker 1: than done. We might do something that to us seems
Speaker 1: completely obvious, but there's no way of knowing that people
Speaker 1: ten thousand years from now will still understand it. There
Speaker 1: are experts who work hard to create iconography and messaging
Speaker 1: that someone unfamiliar with our current alphabet and language and
Speaker 1: symbols might understand. So for a really awesome treatment of
Speaker 1: this top I highly recommend a classic episode of Invisible,
Speaker 1: a phenomenal show. If you've never listened to it, you
Speaker 1: definitely need to. It is It is one of the
Speaker 1: best podcasts I've ever listened to. But this particular one
Speaker 1: comes from way back when it was like two thousand
Speaker 1: fourteen when it published, and it is titled ten thousand Years.
Speaker 1: Really a great, great episode, You should check that out.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible treatment of the challenge of how do
Speaker 1: you convey information to people that you you there's no
Speaker 1: way for us to know anything about them, and keeping
Speaker 1: in mind, like we're talking ten thousand years, because nuclear
Speaker 1: waste can stay dangerous that long. You go back ten
Speaker 1: thousand years and you suddenly think, wow, Yeah, creating a
Speaker 1: message that would be readable ten tho years from now
Speaker 1: that is going to be super challenging to do so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Storing data, retrieving data, destroying data, all of these things
Speaker 1: have their own challenges and obstacles in front of them.
Speaker 1: It's important for us to think about because it's also
Speaker 1: important for us to take steps to preserve things when
Speaker 1: we can. Um there are other great examples we can use.
Speaker 1: One I would point out is that a lot of people,
Speaker 1: particularly in my generation, we used stuff like Facebook to
Speaker 1: become kind of the storage center for photographs, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I have hundreds of photos stored on Facebook. But then
Speaker 1: I decided to piece out of Facebook. So I needed
Speaker 1: to download my Facebook information because otherwise I was going
Speaker 1: to lose access to all those pictures that I had stored.
Speaker 1: And it was just a kind of thing I had
Speaker 1: taken for granted that I would always be on Facebook
Speaker 1: and I would always have access to those images, and
Speaker 1: now I don't, And so it's it's it's again. An
Speaker 1: example of things that we have to keep in mind
Speaker 1: when we choose a orange method is that we should
Speaker 1: also occasionally think of ways to my great information to
Speaker 1: a new storage method to make certain that we don't
Speaker 1: lose what came before. All right, I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: this episode about the paradoxical nature of information in the
Speaker 1: digital age. If you have suggestions for topics I should
Speaker 1: cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out
Speaker 1: to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s
Speaker 1: W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.