About a year ago, my young nephew decided to do a spot of hardware testing on our record player. Unfortunately, nobody was there at the time to determine his reasons for investigating whether the player arm could rotate 360 degrees in all dimensions. Access to a large amount of vinyl audio information was curtailed for a while after this, but fortunately, record players are still being made, so I can still spin such classics as Rolf Harris's version of Stairway to Heaven.
Looking at a copy of the latest version of Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator, Platinum Edition, I was pleased to see that with the right cable, I can now record classics such as this straight onto my hard disk. With a CD burner I could then ensure that this seminal piece of music would not be lost to mankind.
Back in the digital world, format migration ought to be a simple task for most users. At the moment it is very easy to put a floppy disk into a system and copy it onto a hard disk, but what about in 10 years' time?
I suspect there are people out there even now casting around for a system with a 5.25in or even an 8in floppy disk drive in order to recover some vital information. People have been predicting the death of the floppy for years. Major vendors such as Dell have already released systems without floppy drives, and are instead bundling them with USB Flash memory keyrings instead.
Floppy disks certainly have their faults. They are easily corrupted - how many support desks have had to recover important data from a floppy disk after someone put a disk in their back pocket and then sat on it? Even if the durability of the media is guaranteed for years, the cost of replicating the data on it from scratch can far outweigh the cost of the manufacturer giving you a new disk.
The first problem with data migration is the need to have equipment to read the data.
This is what nearly caused the complete loss of two-and-a-half million quid's worth of data from the BBC's 1986 Domesday project. The only suitable medium to hold the data at the time was a Philips laser videodisk, and compatible players have long since been consigned to the scrapheap.
Once you've migrated your data onto new media, have you then got an application program that can actually read the data? Anyone who decided to standardise on a single file format back in the days of DisplayWrite or WordPerfect must be kicking themselves now.
Even if you've found a program that is said to be able to import from a certain file format, it might come up with one of those wonderfully informative error messages, such as "file format error C30090 - file unreadable".
You can see what's going to happen when people eventually have to migrate from data stored on CD-ROM or Magneto-optical archives. There will be problems unless a fair amount of planning has gone into it. But if you think you have a problem with your company's old data now, spare a thought for the scientists at Cern research centre in Geneva. When the Large Hadron Collider project starts up they'll be busily cranking out terabytes of data. Imagine having to migrate that lot to new media in 10 to 20 years' time...
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