One of my hobbies is genealogy - or more specifically tracing the history of my family and its various attachments. My family tree grows almost daily as I push back in time as far as possible (with the number of "lines" to follow doubling at each generational step into the past), and also discover cousins, cousins of cousins and other appendages. But this is not just an exercise in "name-bagging". What I find really fascinating are the, sometimes very brief, biographical details one unearths about these people. Many of my Russell extended family worked for the Southern Railway - who was the first; what influence did he have over others following him; what caused that line of family "business" to die away? Similarly, there are several closely connected prison warders to investigate. And this says nothing about the ecclesiastical connections in my mother's family. And there is also a steadily growing library of family photographs.
Like many a genealogist, I worry about preserving this information. I have it stored on my desk-top's hard drive; on a stand-alone portable hard drive, on Dropbox's servers, and (some of it) on USB sticks. Is that good enough? Quite possibly not.
Now comes news of a fantastic long-lived, massive storage medium - on fused quartz. If this turns out to be sufficiently popular and cheap then many a genealogist's secure storage worries may be relieved. There is still one major question, though. What format does one use? For how long will we retain the ability to process txt, doc, jpg, ged......... files? Having the hardware is fine but how does one produce long-lived, stable software?
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