can you still retrieve it?

i gotta write this in english, cuz i can't let my mother read this: i lost all the pictures of her visiting me in may this year. they were all digital pictures.

it all happened very simple: i was re-installing my two-year-old laptop. i migrated all my data files on cd. then for some reason, the folder on that cd which held my mother's pictures could not be opened. i migrated the data back to the hd of my laptop and of a desktop, and the folder was empty.

then i read this story (to read this story you need to register to nytimes) about digital memories would sooner be lost than be destroyed. digital preservation has been a problem haunting us ever since we merrily entered the digital age. people keep files in all formats, a lot of which are already or will soon be unreadable: zip disks and 3½-inch diskettes, the larger 5-inch floppy disks, or even hd for obsolete computers.

although we may have a new industry of providing all kinds of old machines for people to access their oldy-format document, we still suffer from hard accessibility before any revolutionary idea of preservation uniformity emerges.

here is some comforting data: new photographic papers can last up to 200 years. and we all know that paper lasts even longer. yeah, i have this cultural arrogance again: our ancestor still beats bill gates and the whole empire and age that he introduced. the invention of paper and printing mechanism still maintains this silent elegance in front of the spinning technology.

think, think twice, and think three times before you store your data.