Bit Rot

Bit—Rot, Data—Rot, Software—Rot everything rots

All this stuff worked well when the digital age was new, shiny and fresh. Now well over 30 years on things start to get more problematic.

Bit, data, software rots cover a multitude of incompatibilities and degradation of digital files, incompatible hardware and software affecting our ability to read or work with legacy files and formats. It’s a state of play that’s been flagged up for years and is really starting to hurt some individuals and business’s.

Everything degrades with time, just look at you in your passport photo when you come to renew every 10 years. Why should digits be any different? On the one hand just how much do we really need to store, hoard and view all those things from the past? When you do need to read that file, see that photograph or check that spreadsheet you’d better hope it’s still readable though.

I’ve got piles of old external hard-drives which would be a real effort to hook up to any working computer now. SCSSI drives were all the thing for large storage of media files. Notoriously fickle in the way chains of these things booted up even on a good day and when new.

If you are intending to maintain working from home more for the foreseeable future then addressing how you maintain data integrity and guard against bit-rot is an important consideration.

What we are really talking about here are:

Files on media which are no longer supported by interface or physical connection. Floppy drives, Zip drives, SCSSI, CD, DVD the list goes on.
Those CD’s DVD’s or hard drives where the medium is starting to physically degrade. Optical and magnetic media orientation degrades over time until unable to be read.
Files where the format has become obsolete or requires upgrading.
Software where ‘software erosion’ has started to take place, applications which perform more and more slowly due to internal software errors, corrupted files, poor design.
Orphaned Cloud formats. You’ve let the subscription lapse and not made local backups only to find access denied. Passwords and user names have been lost or forgotten and you’ve been locked-out. Masses of user details get stolen and your security is at risk.

Cloud storage can be a problematic one. The Cloud isn’t really a back-up solution. It’s somewhere to store files and share them. Services like iCloud are at one level incredibly useful. Integrated so deeply into the OS they appear seamless. Applications which stores all my files in a cloud so I can access and continue writing anywhere, on any device at any time with zero effort on my part. In theory.

One bargain cloud storage is Microsoft’s OneDrive which comes with all their subscriptions to Microsoft 365 and offers 1Tb storage per person on each account, that’s a lot of cloud storage. Even though new for 2023 is that your email account and storage now has to come off the 1Tb up front.

I need to maintain a lot of media files, mainly photographs and video projects. Drives fill quickly with these large files and knowing where items are from even a few months ago becomes an issue. I’ve developed a cataloging system based on plain text files rather than a database format. Even databases suffer software format issues as anyone who’s not constantly upgraded FileMaker Pro will know. The advantage of plain text is it’s one of the few formats which can and always will be readable in a human and machine form, takes up very little space and is easy to search.

Copying all of your files every time a new interface or format comes along isn’t practical and would be prohibitively expensive. As I type one of the external HD’s on this machine has to have a FireWire2 to Thunderbolt dongle to connect it. The drive is more than adequate, just the interface changed. Apple, who’s products I use all the time is particularly swift at junking the old for the new. MacBook Pros now only come with USB-C interfaces meaning that everything else has to be connected via a bag full of dongles and adaptors. Plus with USB-C it’s actually very difficult to see exactly what capabilities the cables have. I recently bought a 4K monitor and tried using the supplied cable to connect a MacMini to it, just as it showed in the instructions but nothing came up, there were no icons on the cable ends, turns out it was just USB-C not USB-C thunderbolt or with Display Port it’s all very confusing and expensive.

If you want to continue to connect to legacy files and drives you’ve either got to be prepared to back up constantly to the latest and greatest formats thus duplicating data many times over which in its self can lead to slight variations in versions. The other approach is to be more pragmatic, perhaps only back up those files which are really important to you or your business. Accept the original files might still be there but may take some time to re-access. Keep a few legacy machines with the original interfaces and software available for the day you may need them. Keep current production software up to date with all the recent patches and security updates. Don’t be too precious about keeping emails and shopping lists from ten years ago, they’re gone, get over it. Don’t buy the cheapest backup drives you can find, they will fail.

I currently have a customer who decided to cut their £400 a year ISP deal to £40/year by changing providers. Now they can’t access any business sensitive emails from before the change over, there are no backups and their hardware is old and not compatible. That 10% fee per year is starting to look quite pricy.

If you really, really want to preserve photos of your children when they were young or important documents, contracts, deeds, wills, that half started novel. Print them out and store somewhere dry and safe and write on the back in pencil who, what, where. Then forget about them for a few years. Eventually we all have to be a bit analogue.