[Gllug] Data migration and electronic archaeology

[Simon Stewart]

On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 01:53:11PM +0200, John Hearns wrote:
> We've recently had a good thread on data recovery from bust drives.
> 
> Let's start a thread on data migration and electronic archaeology.
> 
> 
> What do you do in the Real World (TM) when your computing platform
> is reaching (or has passed) obsolesence?
> Or when all that carefully gathered data is useless when you don't have
> the device left to read it - or the format has long been forgotten?

Isn't this the sort of problem that XML is good for? SGML has been
around for a while, so there's no reason to think that DTDs are going
to become obsolete overnight, and anyone with a brain can work out
most of what a DTD means given an example document and a basic
understanding of regular expressions.

ASCII isn't going away in a hurry, and Unicode is a standard too, so
the data should remain easily readable for quite a while. The only
problem is the degradation and obsolensence of the storage medium if
the data is saved as XML.

Of course, XML isn't a "one size fits all" solution, but it does
help. This just seems to be paraphrasing the mantra "don't get locked
into proprietry technology". Open, documented standards are good not
just because of philosophical reasons....

Cheers,

Simon

-- 
"The Amiga is the only personal computer where you can run a multitasking
operating system and get realtime performance, out of the box."
-- Peter da Silva


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