Nigel Dyer <[email protected]> wrote: > Indeed, but it would have been so much easier if the PhD student had kept > his raw data for us to produce the graph for the paper > it was not a PhD student. It was Prof. Martin Fleischmann. He lost all of his manuscripts and data when his secretary at the University died and the computer went missing. Then he lost all of the information from France when Toyota "forgot" to send it to him.
You can see why he did not trust computers. In a letter to Miles in 1999 he wrote: I would recommend that we should also archive some of the key material - even if we do not evaluate all of this in detail. This exercise should aim to produce discs or C.D.’s as well as hard copy (hard copy at least of selected parts). There are many reasons for my wishing to include such hard copy. Magnetic storage is notoriously ephemeral and also subject to changes in technology. I can illustrate this with the example of what I believe to be some prime data sets which I may be able to access. These reside on tapes using technology which is now obsolete. It would be quite a costly exercise to transcribe and format these data onto discs. All of this would have been avoided if the data had been initially stored as hard copy - this can always be scanned into any new computer system. https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf Actually, he had that backwards. Digital files are more robust and survivable than paper copies. You can always go from digital to hard copy (paper) but it is very difficult to go the other way, and you always lose information. To preserve data nowadays, keep it on hard disks. Not one disk but at least three, one of them off-site. Here's the thing: He was right about computer technology from the 1950s up to around 1985, but after that the situation changed radically, and what he said was no longer applicable. Computer hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than it used to be. As long as you have multiple copies it is very unlikely you will lose your files. They will also not become unreadable the way they used to because there are now trillions of documents preserved in Acrobat format, so people will remember the standard far into the future. - Jed
