I’m a writer and editor who has published a lot of material online in various places, and I also have a bunch of unpublished writing on my home computer.
These web pages and files represent years of work that I care about and don’t want to lose. I use and am thankful for things like Mozy and the Internet Archive that endeavor to keep it all from disappearing. I think they’ll probably continue to do their jobs. But in a world of cybercrime, malicious viruses, cyberwarfare, and headlines about big government and corporate security breaches, I’m not 100% confident. For every major oopsie you've read about, some very knowledgeable security expert must have once explained how it would never happen. Call me paranoid, but I want additional insurance.
I also don’t have a lot of storage space, and I don't want to worry about protecting reams of paper in case of fire, flood, etc. I’d rather just have a small metal film canister that I can keep with other small, valuable things. That's something I can control.
So I want to make a microfilm backup of all my online and unpublished work, to keep someplace safe. I know microfilm is “out,” considered last-century, but it’s impervious to any online shenanigans, electrical grid doomsday scenarios, or anything else like that. Many government and academic org's continue to produce new microfilms for archiving as part of a hybrid strategy that relies on microfilm for preservation and digital for search and retrieval. And should disaster strike, it's easy to convert microfilm text back into digital. Libraries and imaging companies have big, high-speed machines dedicated to specific task of scanning and OCR'ing rolls of microfilm to convert their content into digital files.
The problem is, it would be super expensive for me to make a microfilm backup of just my own writing. I recently got an estimate from a local (SF Bay Area) microfilm / digital conversion and archiving company. Like others, they do big jobs for big organizations, and their setup cost for a new filming job is around $1500, whether its for one roll or one thousand.
Each roll can hold around 2000 pages of text, assuming standard 8.5" × 11" page images, and costs around $110 for materials (the film itself) plus the machine time to expose it. So it would cost me over $1500 to get a microfilm archive of my online life’s work. That’s a lot. But if I went in on a job with 19 other people, the cost goes down to about $100 each, assuming we average 500 pages. For 50 people, it would be only around $60 each.
So I’m organizing a “group buy” microfilm run, looking for other writers, journalists, and blogger types who would like a 100% virus-proof physical archive of their work. Something that requires no more equipment to read than a candle and a magnifying glass, and which could also be readily scanned and re-digitized by standard production equipment in the future, on the other side of any digital catastrophe.
Please let me know if you’re interested, and at around what maximum price. If I get enough takers, I’ll send out instructions and start corralling everything for the filming run. The more, the merrier, since that means cheaper per person. —Paul Spinrad
Photo credit: Mitra Fabian, Flickr