Grappling With Your Digital Records: How To Preserve Them

The digital age is here! Well, it’s been here for a few decades now, but government offices tend to take a little extra time to hop on the bandwagon. Over the past several months, we’ve heard many of our clients in state and local government claim their offices are going paperless to save on space. Given the reshuffling of offices for state agencies, this isn’t surprising.

Even though digital files have been around a while, many people are still trying to wrap their heads around how to manage them. Oftentimes, digital files feel like intangible, mysterious records that live on a different plane of existence.

But digital files—and digitization efforts—have been around for roughly 80 years.

Though digital files existed as far back as the 1940s, they became widespread in the 1980s as computers became affordable to common households and offices. This shiny new technology helped offices eliminate the literal box canyons they created for paper storage and ushered in a faster system to access public records.

As time has gone by and technology has evolved, we added floppy disks, CD-Rs, and other storage media to our arsenal. Record retrieval became faster as we were catapulted into the future, especially with the advent of flash drives and cloud storage

But everything listed above is a “thing.” These are objects. Floppies, CD-Rs, and flash drives are all as real and tangible as paper. Even though the cloud is abstracted from physical hardware, that storage still takes place on servers in data centers, you just might not know exactly where.

If you snap a CD in half, you can’t access those records anymore. Even minor damage can make accessing records on a CD difficult. For example, if you’ve kept some of your CDs from the 2000s and earlier, you know that a CD can skip if one of the many fine grooves that comprise the media become damaged or worn down. (For those who’ve only grown up in the internet age, a CD skipping is like a song on your Spotify playlist buffering. Unlike your Spotify song, however, this skip is permanent.)

The digital files stored on these devices are also real. It’s easy to see them as permanent fixtures that we’ll be able to keep forever simply because they seem untouchable; but our digital files can decay just like our paper files. You can’t just put your files on a hard drive and expect them to work years in the future. As the storage hardware gets older and decays, that decay will affect your digital files, corrupting them and rendering them inaccessible.

Corruption is a scary topic, so let’s start somewhere easier: What are digital files anyway?

Digital files are made up of individual bits—1’s or 0’s. Once you have a set of eight 1’s and/or 0’s, you have 1 byte. As your bytes multiply, they become kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), and terabytes (TB), forming increasingly large and complex files.

As we covered earlier, your bits and bytes are living on storage media—they’re on your hard drives, flash drives, CD-Rs, and whatever other storage devices you use. Just like how paper yellows and becomes brittle with age, your 1’s or 0’s may begin to suffer from “bit rot.”

Bit rot is a phenomenon researchers are still investigating, but the working theory is that a digital file’s 1 or 0 flips to the opposite number. So, your 1 becomes a 0 or your 0 becomes a 1. That sounds like a minute change, but it unfortunately has devastating effects on a digital record. It may cause your font to appear wrong, colors to change, or prevent you from accessing the file altogether.

So, how do we keep our files from decaying?

The easiest thing we can do is to create back-ups (also known as redundancies). A good rule of thumb is to follow the 3-2-1 rule of data back-ups. This means you’re creating 3 copies of a record, storing it on 2 media types (i.e. a flash drive, a hard drive, or in the Cloud), and placing 1 copy off-site. There’s an acronym in the library-world called LOCKSS—Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. If you’re following the 3-2-1 rule of data back-ups, you’re creating lots of copies and, thus, are keeping your stuff safe.

In addition to suffering from damage or decay, your storage devices are limited by space constraints. Just as you only have but so much paper in a composition notebook, you have a finite amount of space on your flash drives, hard drives, and other storage devices. These days, we usually have far more digital space than we know what to do with, though it’s important to remember that this space isn’t endless and that it costs money.

If you purchase a hard drive with 50GB of space, you have 50GB of space to use. But that 50GB isn’t forever since your device is gradually decaying. As that hard drive ages, you’ll have to migrate whatever you stored to a new storage device. The hard drive is not immortal and, if you have long-term or permanent files, you should consider the costs of migration and purchasing new devices.

When purchasing or using a storage device, you should also pay close attention to trends in storage devices. Floppy disks, which were once all the rage, are now mostly obsolete, and individuals who want to access files stored on floppies must find a floppy disk reader. Likewise, DVD/CD readers used to be included in laptops. In the era of streaming services, this feature has been discontinued, and people must rely on external readers just like they would for their floppies. If you have important records stored on these devices, you must pay attention to these trends lest you lose access to your files.

Data migration isn’t exclusive to physical media devices. If you’re considering switching your storage from Microsoft to Google, you’ll have to migrate all your data from your current system to the new one.

That migration costs money and takes time. Just like you don’t want a storage room filled with out-of-office messages, you don’t want those sticking around and taking up valuable server space! Make sure to regularly delete spam and junk messages to save on storage costs.

All in all, there are many things to consider when it comes to storing your digital files. Maintaining digital records can feel overwhelming and, at times, discouraging. But armed with the right knowledge, we hope everyone—government employees or not—can feel a little more confident in their work.