Digital will endure everything. Standard methods of combating “invisibility”

Information carriers are becoming more and more sophisticated. But the greater their capacity, the less reliability and service life. How not to lose the knowledge accumulated by humanity and preserve your personal archive?

In 2008, when the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was discussing plans for new expeditions to the Moon, it needed data on the properties of lunar dust collected in the late 1960s as part of the Apollo program. They were recorded on 173 magnetic tapes, the originals of which NASA has lost. Copies were preserved at the University of Sydney, but to read them you needed a special IBM 729 Mark V drive, long out of production, and there was simply nothing to read the once common magnetic tapes (with a multi-track parallel data presentation format). Fortunately, a working copy of the drive (the last in the world) was found at the Australian Computer Museum.

A similar story happened in the 1990s with American archivists. They set out to get acquainted with the 1960 census data, stored on magnetic media. And there were only two computers capable of reading this data: one in the United States, the other in Japan.

Learned from this experience, the world's largest Library of Congress (USA) has created a special unit that stores devices for reading information from outdated electronic media. However, there is no certainty that the library’s collection is complete and that in some departmental or provincial archive there will be no media for which there are no longer any devices or software left to read it.

Burdensome inheritance

At some point, every family has to decide what to do with the collections of vinyl records or tapes inherited from their parents, with cassettes and reels of photographic and film film. It's almost impossible to listen or watch them now. The principles of sound recording have changed three times in the memory of representatives of the older generation, and sound media and devices for their reproduction have changed six times. At first these were shellac records (78 rpm), then vinyl “long-playing” discs (33.3 rpm), first released in 1948 by Columbia records. Almost simultaneously with this innovation, reel-to-reel tape recorders appeared, then cassette recorders. In the mid-1980s, digital optical compact discs replaced older analog media. Five - ten years ago and they began to be forced out universal devices flash memory. Distributors of sound recordings are gradually abandoning media in favor of intangible files downloaded via the Internet.

Generational changes in home film and video production have occurred even faster. Narrow film cameras (8 and 16 mm), which became generally available in the late 1950s and early 1960s, were supplanted in the 1980s home video VHS format. Less than 10 years later, DVDs appeared, similar in structure to an audio CD. Now, like sound recording, amateur video recording is moving to computer file formats that can be easily distributed over the Web.

Oddly enough, the more advanced the carrier with technical point vision, the shorter its service life. There are almost no exceptions to this rule. Books and manuscripts on parchment can last for thousands of years, not to mention clay tablets and inscriptions on stone. Paper publications produced before the 19th century, if protected from moisture, light, rodents and insects, can be stored for hundreds of years. But at the end of the 18th century, to the chagrin of archivists, a method of making cheap paper from wood was invented. It turns yellow and becomes brittle over several decades, synthetic dyes on it fade, regardless of the care of storage, for “internal” reasons (in the light this happens even faster). In the Soviet Union, by the way, there was a government program to produce durable papers for important documents. And by the 1990s, the USSR began producing paper for office work, designed for storage up to 850 and 1000 years. However, the computer revolution made the implementation of this program unnecessary: documents began to be stored on electronic media.

The pale "captive"

The only medium that appeared during the technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is comparable in durability to paper is black and white photographic film on a polyester base. As for celluloid film produced before the 1960s, it had a shorter lifespan than newsprint: celluloid contains substances that evaporate over several decades. The film warps and loses transparency.

Color film, especially those produced before the 1970s, also does not last more than a few decades. If you use it, it becomes unusable even faster: this fragile material fades and is scratched by dust particles even with careful handling. Recently, an unrestored copy of “Prisoner of the Caucasus” was shown on television, which had faded almost completely over the course of 40 years, this was especially noticeable in episodes with a predominance of light colors.

Vinyl discs, like black and white film, can theoretically last forever in archives, but quickly wear out when played. Shellac records of the first half of the twentieth century generally withstand only a few dozen playback cycles, even if the steel needle is changed after each play on the gramophone.

Digital media fails simply when stored. Floppy disks are especially short-lived. The magnetic layer on them crumbles, the magnetized areas of the layer, domains, become demagnetized over time under the influence of thermal movement of the nodes of the crystal lattice. Even if you find a readable drive for five-inch floppy disks (which went out of use in the early 1990s), they will most likely not be readable, either at all or partially. True, the author of this article recently needed to read a five-inch Bulgarian-made Izot floppy disk, recorded on a Pravets-16 computer in the late 1980s, and, imagine, the data on it turned out to be intact! It’s not for nothing that in the Soviet era everything computer components passed military inspection. Three-inch floppy disks are more durable in use than five-inch ones, but they are less durable in storage because the information on them is recorded at a higher density and the magnetic domains are smaller.

A hard drive (by the way, the cheapest drive per megabyte of data) lasts about five years. But it often fails faster, especially when it heats up, and during operation it inevitably gets hot. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University examined 100,000 drives in 2007 and found that the main indicator of reliability (mean time between failures) was overestimated by manufacturers by about 15 times. Every year, according to researchers, not 1% of disks fail, but 2-4%, and failure peaks are observed not only after the fifth to seventh year of operation, but also in the first! Moreover, as it turned out, the reliability of hard drives for the mass consumer is approximately the same as that of high-performance drives that “have increased reliability” (and, of course, are more expensive) intended for professionals.

The most durable optical discs (CDs and DVDs) are stamped and pre-recorded. They, according to the manufacturers, can operate without failures for more than 30 years when stored under proper conditions. And recordable and especially rewritable CDs and DVDs (in which information is recorded not in depressions-elevations, but in transparent-opaque zones) can lose information within the first decade. Moreover, for data disks, which have fewer spare bits for information recovery, this threshold is lower than for audio CDs (Audio CD and the rare Audio DVD).

Flash drives have approximately the same durability as stamped optical discs. The reliability of storing information on flash drives increases significantly if you periodically, at least once every few years, rewrite it. On a rewritable CD, the carrier layer degrades over time, whether you rewrite the disc or not. On a flash drive, information is stored in the form of charges, which are gradually dissolved due to thermal factors or, for example, damaged by cosmic particles, but nothing happens to the base itself. By rewriting, you can extend both the life of the media and the storage time of information. (A similar process occurs in the computer’s RAM, only the information in the DRAM chips that make up this memory is renewed—regenerated—several times per second.)

In general, digital data on modern media has a huge advantage over old analog ones - they are simply and quickly copied without loss, and the copy is identical to the original. The durability of such media is not even that important: timely copying of information allows you to store it almost forever.

What Jupiter can do, a computer cannot

Each new analog format for recording sound or video always required a new device for playing it. Now, if necessary, we have to look for this device, and also provide for the possibility of pairing old and new reading devices. For example, on the back panel of a household VCR (recorder or player) you can see many connectors. Each VCR must now support at least five digital interface standards - component, composite, S-video, SCART and HDMI. Computer video cards add analog VGA and digital DVI to this list, and there are also DisplayPort and UDI standards. Fortunately, many of these interfaces are compatible with each other at the adapter level. This way you can turn digital DVI into digital HDMI or analog VGA into analog S-video. However, such a simple method cannot turn an analog interface into a digital one. Therefore, video devices have to retain many interfaces to ensure compatibility with existing equipment, including television receivers from the early 1980s.

But the same difficulties can arise with computer digital data. Over the past 20 years, not only floppy disks have become a thing of the past, but also streamers and magneto-optical disks (Iomega Zip and others), once popular among scientists and stockbrokers. To reproduce obsolete media, there is only one solution - the same one that was used in the Library of Congress, namely: save devices for reading all possible media and maintain them in working order. But this solution is practically inaccessible to a private individual - is it worth keeping a Jupiter reel-to-reel tape recorder or a Rus film projector just to listen to old recordings or watch family newsreels once every few years, depending on the mood?

The only way to get around this obstacle is to take the time and money and digitize all archives. On the scale of a family farm, this is a completely doable task, although a lot of effort may have to be made. Scanning and proofreading texts, for example, can take more than one day. But digitizing your home photo archive, including negatives, is relatively simple - you can use an inexpensive household scanner with an insert for negatives. You can send such originals for digitization - now almost any photo laboratory provides this service at a very reasonable price. affordable prices. It is more difficult to digitize films - only a few offer such services and they are expensive, and a simple amateur who does not have experience and equipment cannot do it.

In the same way large archives may come from older originals stored in analogue formats. Conversion into “digital” makes information more accessible, it becomes possible to send and copy it without damaging the original (films and magnetic recordings, for example, degrade during analog copying). The amount of work ahead in this area is enormous. But its implementation is hampered by problems with intellectual property legislation.

So far, only a small part of old data has been digitized worldwide. And a significant share new information continues to be produced in its traditional form. In Russia, 50,000-60,000 titles of printed book products are published annually, while the largest Russian-language digital libraries- both legal and pirated - contain no more than 60,000-80,000 digitized books. If this continues, then when in the near future there will be a massive transition to electronic media, a huge part of the existing information array will be inaccessible and will fall out of circulation.

This informal world

When transferring information to “digital” there is new problem: Computer files come in many formats. There are several dozen archivers, in addition to the well-known ZIP and RAR, and some are used only in a limited area. But if a special device is required to read analog media (like tape recorders or film projectors, based on physical principles that are not currently used), then to read digital file the old format only needs the appropriate program. If it is not at hand, it is easy to find it, or, in extreme cases, write it again, which is cheaper than creating an entire playback device.

There are only a couple of dozen text data formats, of which half a dozen are commonly used - “pure text”, a couple of Microsoft formats(DOC, DOCX and RTF), OpenDocument Format (ODF), as well as HTML web format and illustrated format PDF text. The remaining fifteen hundred were produced by manufacturers of electronic readers for specific devices. Relatively few formats are used to represent static images - the list is almost limited to five: TIFF, JPEG, GIF, BMP and PNG. The rest are mostly tied to specific application areas or graphics programs.

For audio, the variety of formats is significantly greater, for video - even greater. This is due to the fact that sound and video files are much larger than text or static images, so they have to be compressed for ease of use. On the Internet, video and sound must be presented as compactly as possible, even sacrificing quality, but when recording on DVD, and especially Blu-Ray, you don’t have to “save much.”

At the same time, common types of video files like AVI, OGG or MPEG-4 are not yet formats, but so-called containers. A container is a wrapper for content that can be presented in different formats (that is, written with different codecs). Containers are not only popular types of video files, but also many common types of text, audio or image files (for example, PDF, WAV or BMP are also containers). In the field of video production, the problem of formats is most acute. For example, the developers of the MPEG-4 standard left private companies a certain freedom in determining methods and techniques for video compression. Therefore, you should not be surprised if a video disc recorded on one computer cannot be played on another, where there is no suitable codec program.

In general, converting data from one format to another is a completely automated procedure, and this process can proceed without losses. Losses occur only when converting compressed formats, but in the general case (everything, of course, depends on the degree of compression) is not as significant as when copying analog information. Therefore, it is better to store data digitally on modern media and change the latter when there is a danger of its obsolescence and disappearance. This requires time and money, but much less than creating conditions for storing unique information recorded on analog media in previous centuries.

Archivists solve the problem simply and cheaply: they store information in machine-independent, standardized formats. Naturally, the text format became the basic format - what is in computer programs called "pure text". Numerical tables are cleared of the additional data that accompanies them when created in programs like Excel, and are presented as a sequence of text characters. But archives do not exclude the use of their own formats. Then, at the input, all documentation is converted into a format that is optimal for storage, and at the output, when transferred to a specific user, the reverse procedure is performed - converting the data into the format that is most convenient for the customer.

What awaits us in the near future? The world is gradually moving towards information without media, that is, for the user, media becomes virtual. This disk arrays"somewhere out there." Many companies already offer data storage on the Internet (in the “cloud”, that is, in distributed storage without a specific location). In the same way, according to copyright holders, the distribution of music and films should occur: I wanted to watch and listen, connected to the Internet and for a small fee went to one of global catalogs media products.

But storage managed from single center, not much more reliable than local storage on users’ computers. Bulk email services or services like Google Docs experience access failures all the time. Global outage such services with irretrievable data loss is a hypothetical scenario, but not at all fantastic. In addition, user access to the centralized storage can be closed at any time, and this is already a political problem. But the security issue in such storage facilities cannot be solved in principle: any computer protection can be hacked. So the ideal way to store information is still a matter of research.

A compact USB drive, known to most users as a flash drive, is today considered the most common device for storing and exchanging various data. A frequently occurring problem: “No files are visible on the flash drive” can have quite disastrous consequences. After all, important documents of a confidential nature are often transferred to a Flash USB Drive device, unique photos and another type of valuable information may be in a single copy. If you encounter similar problem for the first time, don't panic. There is a high probability that the missing data is still there - on the flash drive. You just don't see them because they are hidden. To solve the problem of “invisibility”, let’s turn to the practical experience of experienced ones and consider the main aspects of digital restoration.

Two main reasons: why did the information disappear?

So, when you inserted a USB drive into your computer, you discovered that there are no files visible on the flash drive. In the vast majority of cases, it is the user who is the culprit of this kind of trouble. And most often, it is as a result of improper operation that the Flash device begins to work in “magician” mode. Of course, one cannot discount manufacturing defects in the production of a product and unfavorable accidents of a metaphysical nature. However, the harsh reality shows that the cause of the malfunction can be either hardware or software.

Files are not visible on the flash drive: ways to fix the problem

The first thing to do is to carry out visual inspection the subject of our attention. It is possible that the data transfer device is purely mechanically damaged. A once-spilled cup of coffee can also have a direct connection with the disappearance of files. Make sure that the contacts of the Flash drive are not oxidized. If the device is equipped with a signal LED, operability should be confirmed by the indicator lighting. However, if the computer detects a connected device, then, most likely, the “hero of the occasion” has software roots that could well be undermined by a malicious one. However, such “tricks” can be exposed as a result of using special software, but first...

Standard methods of combating “invisibility”

If you don't see any files on the flash drive, try the following:

Connect the USB device to your computer.
Use the key combination “Win+R” to open the “Run” window.
Next, enter “cmd” in the checkbox.

In the “Command Editor” write “Attrib -h -r -s / c /d k:\*.*”, where the Latin k should have the literal value of your removable storage device.
Press "Enter" and hidden files will become apparent again.

Second Windows solution: Changing system settings

It is quite possible that the folders and files located on the flash drive have been assigned the “hide” attribute. In this case, the Flash drive connected to the PC will appear empty.

Go to the “Control Panel” menu.
Now go to the “Appearance and Personalization” section.
In the “Folder Options” block, activate the “Show hidden files” link.
The last item in the list must be activated. That is, the item “Show hidden files, folders...” must be marked with a marker.

If this method did not have the desired effect, and everything is also not visible, try the method described below.

Option three: checking the parameters of one of the registry branches

As a result of a virus infection, malicious code can change records in the system Windows log OS. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the integrity of the parameters involved. It is worth noting that extreme caution should be exercised when working with the registry, since wrong actions and wrong changes made can critically affect the full functionality of the Windows system as a whole.

Using the "Run" menu, you need to open
Enter the command "regedit".
After the utility utility opens, follow the path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL.
The “CheckedValue” key entry (right area of the editor working window) must correspond to the value “1”.
There should be nothing in the “Type” column except “REG_DWORD”.

If the entry did not match the specified pattern, your PC is probably infected computer virus, which means it is necessary to check the system for the presence of “destructive code”.

An obvious question: “How to open invisible files?” and an effective answer to it

Algorithm of actions:

Download to PC antivirus utility Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free.
Launch the installed software.
Scan everything sections of hard PC disk and USB flash drive.
If a “digital infection” is detected, remove the source of infection.

It is worth noting that in some cases, even after treating the hard drive and storage area of the flash drive with antivirus software, the problem will not disappear. Because as a result of the destructive activity of unfavorable code, OS service files and even the disk structure could be changed. In such cases, the recovery process, and in the case of the system - complete reinstallation Windows simply cannot be avoided.

How to recover lost data

As a rule, as a result of incorrect manipulations with removable media Beginners have a question: “Why doesn’t the flash drive see the files?” To resolve this kind of problem, you need to download and install it on your PC. special program. Among huge amount similar software The most attractive is the free data recovery utility Recuva, which you will learn about in the section below, and also learn the basic techniques for working with it.

Recuva is a free data “reincarnator”

So what needs to be done?

Download this software product from the official website.
After installation, run the utility.
Select the type of information you are looking for. The most acceptable option is all files.
In the next window, select “On the memory card”.
Once you have confirmed your choice, the scanning process will begin.
If the result turns out to be ineffective, go to the “Advanced Mode” tab in a special program window.
Check all inactive items and repeat the startup process again.
The files found in this way need to be restored. Click the button of the same name in the lower right corner of the program.
Check the checkboxes next to the found files.
After activating the “Recover” button, your data will be saved to the directory you specified.

As you understand, this program will also effectively cope with the possible difficulty when the memory card does not see files. However, with using Recuva can be restored deleted information from almost any type of media.

Instead of an afterword

So, you have learned what to do if the flash card does not see files. Nevertheless, do not forget about basic operating rules, the observance of which guarantees long-term operation of the storage device:

Do not save information to a flash drive that has not previously been scanned by antivirus software.
Remember that you need to disconnect the USB drive correctly, deactivating it using the Windows tool: “Safely Remove Hardware”.
You should not use the same flash drive in various systems. This warning is especially relevant for mobile storage devices (for example, SD memory cards).
Don't forget to make a copy of the data from the USB drive to the hard drive of your PC.
In some cases, to recover lost files from a specific modification of a storage device, you may need specific specialized software.

All the best to you and your flawless Flash devices!