You may think that with today's technology, any information is just a click away but what makes this possible, and how do we make it accessible to more people? Map, compass, flashlight, camera, notebook. Just a couple of years ago my backpack would've included all this stuff, but many of us have shed some weight in favor of one tool that does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Well, maybe it doesn't do everything. While we appear to pull information out of thin air, it has be stored someplace and behind the scenes. Retrieving it is complicated, both scientifically and socially. There's a lot to consider. For one, how durable is this form of information storage? And what is the environmental impact of ever changing technology that is hot today but not tomorrow?


>> I would say that places like the Judaica Library here are really important because they preserve manuscripts and books and all kinds of ephemera that are really important in preserving our past and these are materials that were really, in many cases, meant to last. There are things like parchment that could survive hundreds of years and others that perhaps weren't meant to have that kind of long term, that longevity but which, because of the way in which they're kept here, we're hoping they'll survive several hundred years.

And that of course is quite different from the way that we think about data today and the way that we save it.
>> Wow, listen to how loud it is in here!
>> Yeah, it is loud.
>> You can feel the heat just coming off the machines.
>> So we're here at a high powered computing center.

Clearly there's a lot of data being stored behind us, some process. Can you tell us about how that data storage works?
>> Well the magnetic data storage is a lot like a refrigerator magnet, or a standard bar magnet you might play with and pick up things with. It has a north and a south pole.

The north pole is considered a one, and the south pole could be considered a zero and that forms the one and zero of a binary storage mechanism, a series of ones and zeros, which is used to break down information into a unit like that so you can store it.

So each magnet has a different orientation in the storage mechanism inside these machines, and that orientation determines whether that bit of information is a one or a zero and that allows you to both store the information and then recover it.
>> A magnetic hard drive works by storing information on the surface of a disk.

Now this disk can consist of as many as 50 different layers that you've deposited on the surface to create a single region where you can actually store a magnetic dipole. Now, how do you read that dipole? You have to have a head that goes over it and tells you whether or not the north pole is pointed up or down, or side to side depending upon the way that the magnetic hard drive works.

That head has to fly over the surface and read that tremendous amount of information. It's the equivalent of flying a 747 with 100,000 people on it at 60 miles an hour 1/100th of an inch above the surface of the Earth. So you can imagine trying to do that.

It would be very, very difficult but that flying head does that and that ability to control that during the process is what enables these hard drives to work so efficiently.
>> This makes sense that you can use these, the directions of your magnet is pointing doesn't fit but I think of a bar magnet as being quite large.

So what materials are allowing them to get small enough to store all the data that is behind us?
>> So actually it's the same kind of material. For example, the element cobalt, or an alloy that contains cobalt. It's just how the material is made. It's made into a thin film, such that each individual grain of cobalt is only about five nanometers across.


>> Okay.
>> And those, those are the same kinds of refrigerator magnets as you would have on your refrigerator, they're just a lot smaller and when you record the bit, several of those get pointed along the pane direction to form a single bit.
>> Well there's two ways to store information traditionally.

There is the magnetic way of storing it, where you're storing it as the polarization of a small magnet and you're putting that on a hard drive or hard disk, they call that and you're reading with a head and the other way to do it is to actually store it inside of a transistor.

So you shove an electron up into the gate oxide, and you just leave it there and it tells you whether or not that electron is there. It tells you whether you've got a one or a zero and so that ability to store information in microelectronic device is called a flash memory and the other way is a magnetic hard drive, and we use them for different applications but both of them have been exploding in their capacity over the last 15 or 20 years.


>> In flash storage, data's actually being stored as electric charge. So electrons are put into a place where they can be stored, and then read back by seeing whether they're there or not and so it's very similar to the transistor technology that's used in the processors in these machines.

Flash storage is a semiconductor based memory.
>> Okay.
>> So it doesn't use magnetic materials at all.
>> Because that does not involve using any kind of rotating head and magnetic storage and because of that, you can use flash memory in portable applications where it may take a lot of violent knocking around, but it's not gonna hurt the memory.

You're not gonna lose your memory and store it permanently that way. You're in a jogging situation or you're in any kind of situation where you would worry about a hard drive crashing, you don't have to worry about it with flash memory, because it's a permanent storage that can take that type of abuse.


>> Most likely, a lot of the standards are still in place. I think what's more likely to happen is that the mechanical nature of at least the disk drive is being replaced in places where it makes sense by these non-mechanical technologies like the solid state. So the disk spins at 4,000 to 15,000 RPM.

The head is actually flying over the disk so it's a very mechanical device. There's certain environments like high humidity, or lots of shock or vibration where those kinds of technologies don't have an advantage. It's not that you can't mitigate those problems, it's that solid state, with no moving parts, doesn't have those disadvantages and so you will see, I think, a transition to those kinds of storage, whereas the conventional disc storage will continue to be used in places like this, where it's nice and cool, it isn't moving, it's in a server rack, and so forth.

Unless there's an earthquake, it's not gonna be a problem.
>> There are also huge limitations to storing information electronically. Drives crash, and technology quickly becomes outdated. If you went to college just 10 years ago, you might have stored your papers on floppy disks. If you don't have a paper copy, good luck finding a way to access it today.


>> Thinking back to my time in college, I can't use the floppy disks anymore that I used to write papers on. It's completely inaccessible, so the technology is changing really quickly and I mean, for somebody like a historian, I'd say, what I see now, which really worries me, is for instance, when I look at the 19th century for instance, I use letters extensively and I think in the last 20 years letters have disappeared.

And I wonder how historians in the future will try to access what's in emails or on blogs or who's gonna maintain those sites? They're not built for the long term, they're built for immediate responses now but it's gonna be very difficult to reconstruct the history of the 1990's, 2000's, as we're shifting technologies and there aren't mechanisms in place for saving and preserving them.


>> Now as far as being able to read it back, there are, you know in the end, it's still cobalt grains. So there's always a way to go in. For example, if your drive crashes they have technologies where they can go and actually measure the state of those little bits and actually recover your data.

So, not that that's going to be as easy as putting in a cassette tape.
>> People are really looking forward and not necessarily thinking about how will people remember us. I'm hoping in the next decade or so people are going to realize there needs to be more attention to that but there are a lot of obstacles that exist now that didn't exist in the 19th century.

For instance, privacy laws. I mean, are we gonna be able to go into people's emails and see them? What are the mechanisms by which electronic correspondence is going to be preserved? The kinds of data that are being collected now, how are they gonna be stored? And are there mechanisms that will seek to preserve them?

I think there are going to be some big gaps as historians look back to the period in which we look at now. What worries me a little bit is the way in which we've become such a throw away culture. Everything is to be updated and upgraded constantly. Let's think about sort of more sustainable projects and while of course it's really important to continue improving things, maybe we can do so in a way that doesn't require that you throw away the old machine.

Maybe we can plug in pieces that will allow us to salvage parts of these cuz I also worry about the impact that these things have on the environment.
>> It's possible that we will invent some materials, or come up with some combinations of materials that have that kind of lifetime and are still digital.

There may be some candidates out there. I don't know exactly what that's gonna look like, but I think there's obviously a need for a variety of different kinds of storage mechanisms for all of these things.
>> But I think at the end of the day we're always going to have a backup of some form or another.


>> Always gonna need a backup.
>> So see, it's a lot more complicated than the click of a button or the swipe of a screen. What if it were up to you to decide? How would you make information accessible and lasting when almost everyday another shiny object claims to be the next big thing?