1. Investigating the Effects of Data Migration Samuel Ranta, 23.11.2015

2. Ingredients of archival disaster: multiple platforms, multiple formats, no compatibility Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

3. Doomsday prophecies “…we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages…” Terry Kuny, 1997

4. Claims made “Similarly, existing translation software available for the migration and translation of document formats illustrates that the problems are significant and the results are often less than satisfactory. The simple case of conversion between the most popular document formats, MS-Word and WordPerfect provides ample illustration of the challenges that are faced…” Terry Kuny, 1997 For my surprise, the very first attempt to transfer old manuscripts of medicine paper caused no problem at all. The result was perfect. Every key stroke was migrated perfectly.

5. Claims made ”Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost”. -Jeff Rothenberg, 1999 The very first attempt to read old VAX-tape from 1985 was succesful. ”It took less than a minute, no problem at all”, said the statement of the company representative who did the job for me.

6. Claims made ”…the nearly universal experience has been that migration is labor-intensive, timeconsuming, expensive, error-prone, and fraught with the danger of losing or corrupting information”. -Jeff Rothenberg, 1999 In our yet unpublished article (mostly due to the lack of reviewers and lack of suitable publishing forum), we migrated 41 files through 12 versions of Photoshop from 1993 to 2012. After eliminating changes produced by lossy formats, we were left with only two cases where migration produced errors. Errors were not very severe, images have to be zoomed in to spot the changes. Changes produced at the binary level are tremendous (migration to the next generation can produce 76679 changes), but these all happen to the metadata, the actual image data is intact. (Contrary to what was claimed).

7. Image data (intact) Metadata (changed) Screenshot from ExamDiff Pro

8. It has been claimed this happens to images during the migration process: This seems to happen only if warnings about quality loss or known facts about the nature of the image formats are completely ignored.

9. But what about the ”universal experience”. We all have it! So far, my experiments with office applications have shown that they are much more compatible than generally thought, but when tested with the.docx - files filled with charts, tables, shapes, SmartArt – objects and migrated to another application, the tracks of universal experience start to arise. When.docx document is filled with the whole repertoire of objects used is opened in LibreOffice and NeoOffice…

10. Original:

11. Migrated to LibreOffice Vanilla (mac):

12. Migrated to LibreOffice5 (LubuntuPC):

13. Very complex dynamic documents greatly differ from images and other static data. Our experience probably originates from all the problems we have experienced with them and some data transfer errors and rare cases where application, for some reason, writes the file in a form that is inaccessible for some applications. I noticed an incompatibility issue with notepad 10.0 (Windows 10) and Leafpad 0.81 (Lubuntu):

14. Should be:

15. In Leafpad:

16. Difference between non-working and working:

17. Reason found:Unicode Unicode

18. I accidently saved the same file in with two different encodings. Leafpad doesn’t support Unicode (or supports it inadequatly). Migration can cause errors if the process is not controlled from start to end. The question is, what is the role of metadata in the future? What about program code? How precisely can we migrate that?