I love filing, and organising, and finding more efficient ways to store data. I order everything carefully, my room, living spaces, and equipment are always highly organised with thought and care behind each thing. I think it's the job of humanity, and the job of life itself to organise, tidy and order, blessed at the cleaners and the archivists, for they are doing the ultimate job of life itself.
It's the last day of the year, so I've spent it filing my computer data; amazingly I've made about 100Gb of new data this year, which is about 20% of everything I've ever made in 30 years; of course this is the problem with my recent fad of video. My games take months (or years) of work yet can be tiny, only a few Mb in size. All of my 1000 or so catalogued paintings have 300 dpi scans, most with photos of the work in their frames too. That data, my music albums, and my videos take up the three bulk lots of data.
Each album has 600 dpi artwork now (for CD format, so 600dpi at 12cm), plus the final music in 32-bit float format, stereo (I could export in 6-track, if I really wanted to mix such a thing), plus takes of any vocals, recordings, sounds. I want to be efficient in storage, not duplicate anything or store too much. Most of my old albums have hardly any information, and no recordings, but as I move more and more to vocal work or other live work, each album is bigger and bigger. The Modern Games takes up as much space as my first ten albums put together! I rarely keep outtakes unless I'm sure they will be useful, it's not efficient.
With video things get bigger. I currently keep enough source video to recompile a 6000kbps final file. Anything more than that would take up too much space at the moment (although, over time, storage methods get cheaper and cheaper, keeping pace with growing data sizes, my new action camera is hugely wasteful with big resolution and a high bitrate for very poor resulting video; there's really nothing to be gained by keeping a full quality copy of its output).
Last night I began to think about how much space a modern digital feature film might take, and the answer was a lot. I also thought about long term archiving options for digital data, which would need to be as strong, and as physical as possible, rather than overly technical or dependent on too much technology (which can become obsolete quickly). Digital data can be very susceptible to deterioration because one bit out of place can really whack a number out.
My solution was a stainless steel, or ceramic, disc (ceramics might be more resistant to heat changes, but may be more brittle). The information would be encoded in physical pits or peaks, like tiny holes and tiny mountains, burned by laser. The pits would be horizontal lines, and form a spiral groove, or perhaps constrained by another valley to make a literal groove, so that if deformed, like a warped vinyl record, the data could still be read. The identical binary digit would be encoded again, in inverse (so a 1 would be encoded as 0) on the opposite side of the disc, this time spiralling from the inside outwards in a second groove. This would limit the effects of groove damage, so at least one piece of data would survive if a groove were damaged.
The bits would be read by comparison with its twin. Say a mountain represents 1, a pit 0. An ideal disc would measure a mountain in the primary groove, and its valley twin, at the ideal height or depth, and so read a 1. The useful part about having twins is that if point A was higher than B, it would equate to 1 (or if A lower than B, 0) no matter what the actual height was; the data is determined by the relative height, so if the entire disc were distorted, the data should remain intact. The reading mechanism would need some sort of key starting point for both heads, and other key details to keep in sync.
The system is like using an analogue vinyl record to store digital data, where even severe distortions will not affect the relative information quality, and having two copies of the data (similar to D.N.A.) would serve as a second check.
This should make the system far more resilient to damage than a CD or hard drive. You could probably take a blow torch to half of the disc as still retrieve data.
Today's filing has taken all day, one of many full days I spend each year merely organising files, filenames, packing and sorting. Archiving is enticing and addictive (as Leon Vitali knows), but creation of new work is the important thing. I think they're both important parts of the same job; digging, shoring up the tunnel...
