Every byte, every record, every backup carries an invisible cap. The cap frays a little with each migration, each format conversion, each warm-aisle year. We have spent a long time learning to count those frayings, and to hold the data steady while we count.
A telomere, in cytogenetics, is a small repeated sequence — TTAGGG, again and again — at the end of a chromosome. It exists so the chromosome doesn't lose anything important when the cell copies itself; it is the offering at the cliff edge, the part of the rope that we don't mind fraying, because the actual climb is held safe beneath.
Data has telomeres too, though we rarely notice them. A file copied from a 1996 hard disk to a 2003 RAID to a 2011 Time Capsule to a 2024 cold-store object will, with some non-zero probability, have lost a byte along the way. Sometimes the byte was a checksum and we caught it. Sometimes it was a pixel of a child's face, and nobody knew until twenty years later when somebody opened the photograph at four in the afternoon and noticed.
amplitude tapers — last 18% feathers to zero — chromosome cap fraying, sub specie aeternitatis
// fragment from logbook
0641 — array reseeded
0703 — checksum on cold-store batch 14
0719 — three sectors flagged, two recovered
0744 — one not recovered. (a single page from somebody's wedding album, 2008.)
0801 — coffee. brought to the lab by R.
There is a particular feeling, at four in the afternoon in late autumn, of light becoming a substance — slow, honeyed, almost weighable. The records vault has windows on the south side, and at four the light comes in low across the shelves. It picks out the dust. It warms the cardboard a little. The drives don't know about the light, of course; the drives are just spinning, dreaming their slow dreams of platter and head. But the curators know.
fig. i — chromosome with intact caps
Format obsolescence is the slow part of the loss, the part that doesn't make a sound. A WordStar 4.0 file from 1985 is technically still here — the bytes haven't gone anywhere — but the grammar that turns those bytes back into a sentence has, for most readers, evaporated. We keep the bytes. We sometimes forget to keep the grammar.
(I have a friend who has spent eleven years writing emulators for dead word processors. She calls them séance machines. The phrase has stuck with me. There is something to it — the writer is gone, the format is gone, but the sentences come back, briefly, into a small green-on-black window.)
grief-curve — the long shoulder, the slow shoulder, the sudden cliff
The Time Capsule died on a Tuesday. It made a sound first — a small, polite click, like a book being shut on the other side of a wall — and then nothing. Most of what was on it was already on three other things, in three other places. But there was one folder, called scans, that had only ever lived there. The folder held seventy-two photographs of a woman's mother, taken between 1962 and 1981. The mother had been dead nine years.
We got sixty-eight back. The other four are the kind of loss that doesn't fit on a length-bar.
An archivist I worked with in the early 2000s — a woman named Margarethe, late sixties at the time, raised in a town that had lost its archive twice in her grandmother's lifetime — used to say that the job was not preservation but translation across time. "You are not keeping a thing," she would say, "you are agreeing, on behalf of people not yet born, to keep translating it into whatever they will be able to read."
She retired in 2009. She still sends a letter every spring. The letters arrive on cotton-rag paper, and I scan them the same week. (I will keep translating them.)
// from the 2003 flood, basement-level shelving
// 14 boxes affected, 3 catastrophic
// recovered: 1981–1989 logbooks (water-stained, legible)
// recovered: 1990s VHS reel-to-reel transfers (mostly)
// LOST: a single shoebox of 5.25" floppies, label illegible
The thing nobody tells you about cold-store is that it has weather. Humidity creeps in through cable conduits. A bad summer in 2001 raised the dewpoint in our second vault by four degrees over six days. The drives were fine. The labels — paper, hand-written in 1994 — bloomed faintly along their edges. We re-labelled, by hand, in graphite. Pencil outlasts ink, in the long run, the way concrete outlasts paint.
A note from the curator, in pencil, dated February 1997: "Began a small experiment today. Took the oldest tape we have — quarter-inch, marked THESIS BACKUP / S.K. / 1973 — and tried to read it on the new drive. The drive made a sound like a small bird. Nothing recoverable. I held the tape in my hand for a while afterward. It was warm — from the drive, not from any other reason — and it occurred to me that this was, in some sense, the last time anyone would ever hold this particular thought."
[transcription incomplete]
transcription incomplete — page water-damaged in the 2003 flood
A photograph, lost. A printout of an autoradiograph, faded. The hand of someone who once worked here, in pencil at the corner of a logbook page: "k.k. — keeper of the warm aisle, summers 1989–1991. moved to montreal." Nobody remembers her last name. The autoradiograph was of a chromosome 17 telomere measurement. The numbers are still legible. The pencil has not yet given up.
What we keep keeps us.