Re: Has anyone looked at digital archiving?

[Graham Toal <gtoal () UTPA EDU>]

> The main advantage of 2D barcodes is easier OCR.  But at what 
> cost---you can't read them with naked eye or a lupe at all.  
> If OCR is greatly important, then using a standard font with 
> no delicate features is a sensible tradeoff toward increasing 
> machine readability while retaining naked eye readability.
> (I don't think it's a good tradeoff, though.)
>
> No 2D barcodes have been around for 40 years, of course.  
> What format would you recommend?  PDF417 for its being 
> widespread or something else?  How would you archive the 
> program that reads the bar codes?

Not that I was advocating this, just pointing out its existence
in answer to someone else's comment; however as a parallel we
do have over 40-yr old paper tapes which we have read by putting
them in a scanner and writing a program to decode the holes.[*]
- http://simh.trailing-edge.com/docs/advmonsys.pdf

(That was before one of our group built a FPGA to interface an
old paper tape reader to his PC)

If you're seriously worried about society having regressed to the
point where we no longer have scanners etc and cannot somehow
read dots on paper, I have to ask what exactly you think we're
going to be doing with this 40-yr old computer data anyway.  I
suspect if we found ourselves in that situation we'd probably
be burning all this paper to keep ourselves warm in our caves.

I still prefer copy from disk to disk, and to hell with long
term recovery if society goes down the tubes.  At least for
junk like financial records.  Now, a blueprint on how to rebuild
society in a hurry, that might want to be stored on something
more robust, like granite.

Keep taking the tablets, Moses.

G
(I promise I will resist the temptation to make further
replies in this thread, I'm afraid I've let this drift way
off topic too much already)
[*: On the other hand, we have some Atlas paper tapes that
we've not been able to decode the character set from.  Anyone
interested in doing a little computer archaeology? -
http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/staging-area/McKendrick/ )