Illusion of permanence

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pay for any utility today — electricity, gas, or heat.

Last fall, EMC acquired Berkeley Data Systems Inc, which provides Mozy, a consumer and small business service that allows people to back up their data on virtual, remote servers and does the work of checking the integrity of the data and repairing decay. But some are just tackling the problem of decoding the crates of disks or records that are collecting dust in people’s basements.

Stewart Adam started a business, Creative Audio Works, out of his attic in Plymouth, taking the sounds of generations past and burning them onto CDs or DVDs so that people can enjoy the 78 records, audio cassettes, and reels of audio from decades ago.

“When people had recordings made in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they thought reel-to-reel is going to be around 100 years or more,” Adam said. “They want to preserve it now so they can hand it along to the grandkids...there are five million hours of analog audio stored on people’s shelves or libraries or basements or whatever — “my goal is to try and transfer some of that.” Other similar services proliferate on the Internet. One company, Ion Audio, sells a “USB Turntable” that turns vinyl records into MP3s, and Tape 2 PC, which turns a mix tape into an iTunes-ready format.

There are plenty of tales of data gone missing or recovered at great expense, but the biggest risk may be information that does not seem valuable at first glance. A cautionary tale is video games — where everything began in digital form, without much thought to how to save them. “It’s not the first thing that comes to mind — you want to preserve important documents and cultural things, paintings, and music and books and all that,” said Albert Yarusso, who runs AtariAge.com, a kind of living video game archive.

But that means the Commodore 64, Atari gaming systems, and even the first Nintendo gaming systems are growing scarce. Programmers are scrambling to revive the games — loading simulators on their computers, digitising the old cartridges. And companies like Nintendo are making classic games like the original Super Mario Bros available on the Wii’s virtual console.