Preservation of Old Movies and Information

Old movies and other old content should be preserved for transfering them to the future generations. The reason for preserving media can also differ from person to person. For me, I care more about having access to old movies that I have memories with than preserving them for future generations. Whatever the reason, the method of preservation is important.

Information can be stored locally or on the Internet. For example, maybe on a cloud storage. Perhaps on Internet Archive. Or an offline storage device like a pendrive. However, each of these methods have different characteristics such as being dependent to a service provider, the Internet, and so on. Also their redundancy is different. Recent problems with the Internet Archive are some of the unfortunate examples of dependency. For local storage, they don’t have things like a natural disaster plan and the local storage device is kept can affect its reliability.

As technology has improved, so have storage systems. CDs are more durable than tapes, and similarly, hard drives are more durable than CDs because they are newer. SSDs are even more durable. So it is possible to see a linear increase in storage technologies’ durability. However, all of the storage technologies can be safe depending on how they are stored and used. In addition to their longevity, they also are also getting faster. Back in the day, it used to take hours to write a huge gigabyte file. Now we have gigabyte-per-minute write speeds. With the increase in speed comes the need to store large amounts of data that can be transferred easily, right? So the cost per terabyte has come down. That has more to do with manufacturing costs than it does with fast transfer speeds, of course. So we have more resources.

One of the most reliable way to preserve a movie or data is to have it kept by multiple people. Although how much P2P file-sharing networks are known for their piracy, the reason why they are able to be used for piracy is because multiple people are enforcing the file. It is difficult to take down each of the source of the file. Also, if people partially lose the data, they can create it by combining information on the P2P network. So P2P can be used to store information redundantly.

Another way is to use RAID mechanisms. RAID combines multiple storage devices. Depending on its configuration, it can keep a copy of the information on the other disk, or it can create information from other disks. NAS devices are one of the common devices for implementing RAID. You can also do LAN streaming of the movies on the NAS. So it will store the movies and also stream them. It’s also a convenient way to store information.