Flashes of Panic

I found, amid the snowdrift of papers, cables and computer parts which is my desk, a second-pass page from one of our recent books with a footnote the editor thought I would find interesting.

Many individuals now consider posting data on the World Wide Web to be a means of permanently archiving data. This is illusory. First, it is simply a transfer of responsibility from you to the computer system manager (or other information technology professional.) By placing your electronic archival copy on the Web, you imply a belief that regular backups are made and maintained by the system manager. Every time a system is upgraded, the data have to be copied from the old server to the new one. Most laboratories or departments do not have their own systems managers, and the interests of college or university computing centers in archiving and maintaining Web pages and data files do not necessarily parallel those of individual investigators. Second, server hard disks fail regularly (and often spectacularly.) Last, the Web is neither permanent nor stable. GOPHER and LYNX have disappeared, FTP is being replaced by HTTP, and HTML, the current language of the web, is already being phased out in favor of (the not entirely compatible) XML. All of these changes to the functionality of the World Wide Web and the accessibility of files stored within it have occurred within 10 years. It often is easier to recover data from notebooks that were hand-written in the nineteenth century than it is to recover data from Web sites that were digitally “archived” in the 1990s!

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