Hell, I still have a couple boxes of old floppies (5.25″) in the office. Guess I better see what VisiCalc spreadsheets I might want to save.
The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.
Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of “losing years of critical knowledge” because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.
She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.
Microsoft’s UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming “digital dark age”.
He added: “Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole.”
Research by the British Library suggests Europe loses 3bn euros each year in business value because of issues around digital preservation.
The National Archives, which holds 900 years of written material, has more than 580 terabytes of data – the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias – in older file formats that are no longer commercially available.
That bytes. (bad, I know)
[tags]Old Data Formats, Data Loss, Obsolete Data Formats[/tags]