Robert Darnton Quotes

Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.

A lot of times you can lose the MP3s - it's a lot of labor to be finding it again, putting things back up. You gotta back up, back up, back up.

Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

As much as we can, we want to prevent people from having to think about how to keep and share their stuff.

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

Back up everything! You are not invulnerable. Catastrophic data loss can happen to you - one worm or Trojan is all it takes.

Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.

I think most organizations have an interest in key recovery, at least with respect to stored data.

It would be better for everyone if we deleted everything by default and saved the things that are important to us.

Records became much cruder in the last 20 years. Let's put it that way.

But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.

All of my memories are now on hard drives. I'll change phones or I'll change my laptop, and all my photos stay.

I don't know how to back up.

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.

Most computers today have built in backup software.

People simply don't have room, physical room, to keep, for instance, 2-inch tape in the sort of quantities that are required to hold a full archive. It's not just a matter of having three or four boxes, it's 40, 90 boxes of 2-inch tape, and very few people have the resources that sort of stuff properly.

Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.

With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.

I've always shied away from online data storage. I don't even use my employers' network drives for anything sensitive. I want to control access myself.

No one has any faith in the tape anymore - everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don't. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.

The value of having a computer, to me, is that it'll remember everything you do. It's a databank.

Anyone with a little computer experience knows that anything can be copied bit by bit with the right equipment.