1. Web page permanency (Warwick Sherring) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:46:05 +1000 From: Warwick Sherring <warwick.sherring@bigpond.com> Subject: [FreeHelp] Web page permanency To: FREEPAGES-HELP@rootsweb.com Message-ID: <4F989ACD.60407@bigpond.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Thank you to all the people that contributed answers to my query on web page permanency. Like William Thompson, I have been around computers for a long time. I started off with a computer with no hard drive and programs run off floppy disks and I have seen floppy disks, tape drives and zip drives pass into oblivion, so I have little faith in the permanence of modern technology. I agree that PDF files appear to be a good option, although they have only been around since 1993. Jim Loudon suggested ASCII text files, which I think is a good suggestion as they have been around the longest. I think the suggestion of Cloud storage is a good suggestion, particularly if several sites are used. The distribution of paper copies, to relatives and institutions is necessary and I have found some of my best genealogy information in Public Libraries and FHS libraries. I intend to stick to a simple html/css format and steer clear of Javascript and other add-ons. I also intend to pursue the Wayback Machine web site archival approach through http://archive.org, which is also a good source of genealogy material. Thanks again to everybody. Warwick Sherring Lismore NSW http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~sherring/ http://freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~sherring/parry/ Ron Mesnard Great suggestions! Before I get on, how did you get 2 sites? I have several very different projects with historical interest that I personally hold key artifacts and information. I have scraped one of my original sites for a more critical project. A site I figured would be permanent that featured my g-grandfather came down this year. I cleaned out the Red Murdocks page and put this one up. http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~redmurdock/LutherMesnard.html I also have distributed CD and paper print outs to relatives. I am replying because I think you need to make decisions not on how old a format is but which is the most close to the raw data. Raw data will have the best staying power. ASCII is FAR safer than a PDF. ASCII, bitmaps and waves are raw data. RTF and jpg are just one step removed from raw data. These will out last any proprietary files no matter how huge the company that made the format is. I would not use any proprietary formats even PDFs and Doc files made by two monolithic companies will go under eventually. Acid free paper is good for more than a century. For that matter I have 150 year old newspaper clippings still readable. My oldest paper record is 300 yrs old and is still readable. archive.org is also a great idea. I suspect freepages will out-last archive.org but you never can tell. Publishing a book and donating a copy to the LDS library is another route to immortality. Low volume books can be published through Lulu and the like. All that aside, much information loses relevance in a century or two. No one will really care about a picture of someone who's complete line died out a century before. Eye witness accounts of historical events and pictures of ancestors will always have interest. I wouldn't trust Cloud storage. Plus how would you pay to keep your files indefinitely? I have had some very bad experiences with off loaded data to keep it secure. This was Microsoft. One day all my data was gone. They blamed it on me. Later I learned my problem was not isolated a contractor friend of mine told me he knew 5 companies that lost all their data with the same excuse. They blamed the problem on the companies. The contractor was put on indefinite hold when trying to get the data restored. Something happened to one of their data centers and they didn't have off site backups or the backups were also corrupt. I also started with computers before PCs had hard disks. I had 3 different operating systems so I could run the different applications made for the IBM PC. IBM PCs were 3-4K for a dual 360k floppy drive computer with 128 K of RAM, there was no personal computer more powerful than that back then. Clones cost less than half of a comparable PC.