The Digital Gutter
Spotlight.
Apple's Mac OS X search facility is built right into the operating system, hooking into the file access functions to know about every last bit that goes in or out of your disks. Every file is indexed the very moment it is written, read, moved, or anything, and searching for file names, file content, file types, dates, or anything is a blast, happening right as you type.
(Alright, Windows got something similar much later, called Live Search, or Search 4.0, or whatever unfunky name is its moniker du jour.)
But the point that has to be made here is not about how fast finding things has become. Rather than organizing stuff, it's possible to simply find it. Even if you are organized (maybe as a result of DCD's filing dogma), searching for your data is much faster than going after it through the directory hierarchy. The more you use certain documents, the more probable it is they show up right away at the top of your search before you even actively remember how you would like to look for them.
But that is also not the point of this post.
Over the years, in some dark corners of the hard disk, directories that have been handed down over time, that have survived copying disks a dozen times, somehow made it through three or four operating systems, twenty upgrades, six or seven different computers, that adhere to naming conventions one cannot remember ever having used, with file formats that you have forgotten you ever had the respective programs for, those directories are still around. These files have begun their lives on 120MB hard disks, were backed up using command line tools onto 1.44MB HD floppies, later onto 100MB ZIP disks, then onto 600MB CDs, sometimes maybe even onto DVDs, before it simply became too unwieldy to take care of all this data, before it became feasible to simply buy more and more storage space to put them onto, and before they were simply and unceremoniously forgotten.
Normally, there is nothing of any conceivable use contained in them any more. Files and file collections that once were considered huge are now sitting around in megabyte-sized chunks, waiting huddled in silence for the day when their file system node will accidentally release them in a crash as orphaned files, which in these days of journaled file systems has become not just improbable, but with pervasive http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html backups on your terabyte desktop disk, manual copies on the central file server approaching petabyte capacities, and Dropbox replication in the infinite cloud simply utterly impossible. Won't every bit and byte somehow end up in the resource fork of some operating system index structure, to be stored away forever and to surface again at the whim of a moment, at the merest twitch of a little finger?
This digital gutter, the last refuge of data that has long outlived its welcome, is dragged back into the spotlight using the search facilities mentioned at the beginning. Presentations from grad school, dissociated program chunks from undergrad courses (originating from right after the last crash, back in the old millenium, that still had a chance of effecting real data loss, files like the first flickering light from the young universe after it had cooled down from the Big Bang), links from the World Wide Web that back then was still awaiting the dot-com boom and knew nothing of the bust that was to come, Java documentation from the language's early, unstable times, they all reappear in milliseconds like impotent spectres when some unsuspecting keystroke combination enters the search.
It's a different world you live in when everything you ever stored, every site you ever visited, every email you ever wrote or received, is less than the blink of an eye away.
Apple's Mac OS X search facility is built right into the operating system, hooking into the file access functions to know about every last bit that goes in or out of your disks. Every file is indexed the very moment it is written, read, moved, or anything, and searching for file names, file content, file types, dates, or anything is a blast, happening right as you type.
(Alright, Windows got something similar much later, called Live Search, or Search 4.0, or whatever unfunky name is its moniker du jour.)
But the point that has to be made here is not about how fast finding things has become. Rather than organizing stuff, it's possible to simply find it. Even if you are organized (maybe as a result of DCD's filing dogma), searching for your data is much faster than going after it through the directory hierarchy. The more you use certain documents, the more probable it is they show up right away at the top of your search before you even actively remember how you would like to look for them.
But that is also not the point of this post.
Over the years, in some dark corners of the hard disk, directories that have been handed down over time, that have survived copying disks a dozen times, somehow made it through three or four operating systems, twenty upgrades, six or seven different computers, that adhere to naming conventions one cannot remember ever having used, with file formats that you have forgotten you ever had the respective programs for, those directories are still around. These files have begun their lives on 120MB hard disks, were backed up using command line tools onto 1.44MB HD floppies, later onto 100MB ZIP disks, then onto 600MB CDs, sometimes maybe even onto DVDs, before it simply became too unwieldy to take care of all this data, before it became feasible to simply buy more and more storage space to put them onto, and before they were simply and unceremoniously forgotten.
Normally, there is nothing of any conceivable use contained in them any more. Files and file collections that once were considered huge are now sitting around in megabyte-sized chunks, waiting huddled in silence for the day when their file system node will accidentally release them in a crash as orphaned files, which in these days of journaled file systems has become not just improbable, but with pervasive http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html backups on your terabyte desktop disk, manual copies on the central file server approaching petabyte capacities, and Dropbox replication in the infinite cloud simply utterly impossible. Won't every bit and byte somehow end up in the resource fork of some operating system index structure, to be stored away forever and to surface again at the whim of a moment, at the merest twitch of a little finger?
This digital gutter, the last refuge of data that has long outlived its welcome, is dragged back into the spotlight using the search facilities mentioned at the beginning. Presentations from grad school, dissociated program chunks from undergrad courses (originating from right after the last crash, back in the old millenium, that still had a chance of effecting real data loss, files like the first flickering light from the young universe after it had cooled down from the Big Bang), links from the World Wide Web that back then was still awaiting the dot-com boom and knew nothing of the bust that was to come, Java documentation from the language's early, unstable times, they all reappear in milliseconds like impotent spectres when some unsuspecting keystroke combination enters the search.
It's a different world you live in when everything you ever stored, every site you ever visited, every email you ever wrote or received, is less than the blink of an eye away.
posted by PJS at
Thursday, October 29, 2009
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