Timeline of digital preservation

This page is a timeline of digital preservation and Web archiving. It covers various aspects of saving and preserving digital data, whether they are born-digital or not.

Digital preservation encompasses a variety of efforts and technologies, so its history can be viewed through various trends in these separate efforts:

  • File systems with built-in fault-tolerance
  • Various changes in the physical storage used
  • On-demand archiving services
  • URL shortening services
  • Various episodes of major archival work, sometimes as a result of services shutting down
  • Efforts at converting physical/analog information to more modern digital media, file formats, and storage

Timeline
YearMonth and dateTopicDetails
1972VersioningMarc Rochkind develops the Source Code Control System at Bell Labs.
1982OctoberPhysical storageThe compact disc (CD) as well as the CD player first become commercially available in Japan.[1][2]
1987JunePhysical storageThe term "RAID" is invented by David Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. In their June 1988 paper "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)", presented at the SIGMOD conference, they would argue that the top performing mainframe disk drives of the time could be beaten on performance by an array of the inexpensive drives that had been developed for the growing personal computer market. Although failures would rise in proportion to the number of drives, by configuring for redundancy, the reliability of an array could far exceed that of any large single drive.[3][4]
1989November 13VersioningContinuous data protection, the technique of backing up computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, is patented by British entrepreneur Pete Malcolm.[5]
1990Possibly the earliest reference to the term "digital preservation" (to mean converting analog media to digital and preserving in digital form) is from this year.[6]: 124 
1996JanuaryWeb archivingThe initial version of the command-line downloading program Wget, then known as Geturl, is released.[7][8]
1996Web archivingThe Internet Archive is founded by Brewster Kahle.[9][10]
1996AprilWeb archivingAlexa Internet is founded by Brewster Kahle.[11] Since this year, Alexa Internet has donated its crawl data to the Internet Archive.[10][12]
1996Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information (Donald Waters, John Garrett, eds.) is published.[13] It became a fundamental document in the field of digital preservation that helped set out key concepts, requirements, and challenges.[14][15]
1997April 8Web archivingcURL, a computer software project providing a library and command-line tool for transferring data using various protocols, releases its initial version of the tool. It is known at this point as HttpGet, would briefly rename itself to urlget, and would finally rename itself to cURL in March 1998. cURL can be used to download files over a network.[16][17]
1998MayWeb archivingThe first version of HTTrack, a free and open source Web crawler and offline browser, is released.[18]
2000The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) launches.[19]
2001OctoberWeb archivingThe Wayback Machine is launched.[20]
2001October 14Version 1.0 of the Parity Volume Set specification, used in Par1, is published.[21]
2002JanuaryWeb archivingTinyURL, the first notable URL shortening service, is launched.[22]
2003JulyThe International Internet Preservation Consortium is founded.[23]
2005Cloud storageBox is launched as Box.net.[24][25]
2005April 7VersioningThe initial version of Git, a version control system with support for data integrity,[26] is released.
2005April 29Web archivingSafari version 2.0 introduces the ability to save complete websites using the proprietary WebArchive format (details at Safari version history).[27]
2005August 1Physical storageThe article "Kryder's Law" is published The law observes that magnetic disk areal storage density has been increasing very quickly.[28]
2005AugustVersioningWritely, a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle, launches.[29][30] By January 2006, Writely would have support for revision history.[31] Upstartle would later be acquired by Google and Writely would be integrated into Google Docs.
2005October 31File systemThe first implementation of ZFS, a file system that includes protection against data corruption, is integrated into Solaris.[32]
2006March 19Cloud storageAmazon Web Services launches by releasing the Simple Storage Service (S3), intended for storing individual files (called objects) in a highly redundant and available fashion.[33][34] S3 is designed for at least 99.999999999% durability (i.e., that percentage of objects is expected to survive after a year) and 99.99% availability (i.e., that percentage of objects is accessible at any given time).[35] The cost of S3 storage dropped over the next decade, reaching 2.3 cents a GB effective December 1, 2016.[36] S3 has been widely used by corporations, libraries, and governments to digitize data for long-term storage.[37][38][39]
2007January 30VersioningMicrosoft Office 2007 is released. Word 2007 introduces the ability to track changes in documents.[40]
2007JuneCloud storageDropbox is founded by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, as a startup company from the American seed accelerator Y Combinator.[41]
2007September 21Physical storageThe initial version of Paperkey is released. Paperkey is a free software implementation of a paper key. It extracts the essential secret bytes from an OpenPGP private key, which can then be printed to paper.[42]
2007October 26VersioningApple releases the initial version of Time Machine.
2007Physical storageTwo software for densely storing information on paper are released: PaperBack[43][44] and Twibright Labs' Optar.[45][46][47]
2007Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI)FADGI is a collaborative effort of 20 federal agencies to articulate common sustainable practices and guidelines for digitized and born digital historical, archival and cultural content. Two working groups study issues specific to two major areas, Still Image and Audio-Visual.[48]
2008Web archivingThe URL shortening service Bitly is launched.[49]
2008April 10VersioningGitHub, a web-based Git repository hosting service, is launched. GitHub would popularize version control and Git. GitHub would also play an important role in encouraging people to make their source code freely available for posterity, allowing others to fork the code and acting as a de facto archive. In addition to software projects, GitHub would also be used to host code repositories for scientific research[50][51] as well as for hosting and backing up websites and content.
2008November 20DigitizingThe prototype for Europeana launches.[52]
2009January 6Web archivingThe Archive Team begins operating.[53][54] Its first big effort, for which it receives press coverage, is to download Geocities data before the service shuts down.[55]
2009Web archivingSocialSafe Ltd, the company responsible for developing SocialSafe, is founded.[56]
2009March 23File systemThe initial version of Btrfs, a file system that supports checksums, incremental backups, and the ability to repair errors,[57] is released as part of the Linux kernel version 2.6.29.[58][59]
2009May 15Web archivingThe WARC file format is published as the standard ISO 28500:2009 1st edition.[60]
2009October 26Web archivingYahoo! GeoCities, a web hosting service founded in 1994, closes its United States branch.[61] Various attempts at archiving GeoCities are made. The site would continue to be available only in Japan.
2010April 14Web archivingTwitter announces that it will donate its archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress.[23][62]
2010December 1Web archivingThe Memento Project provides a standard for interoperability between web archives and the live web. Memento wins the Digital Preservation Award 2010 because "Memento offers an elegant and easily deployed method that reunites web archives with their home on the live web. It opens web archives to tens of millions of new users and signals a dramatic change in the way we use and perceive digital archives."[63]
2011June 28Web archivingGoogle Takeout is launched by the Google Data Liberation Front.[64]
2012August 1File systemMicrosoft introduces ReFS.[65] ReFS has a number of features related to digital preservation including integrity checking and data scrubbing, protection against data degradation, built-in handling of hard disk drive failure and redundancy, and integration of the RAID functionality.
2012August 21Cloud storageAmazon Web Services launches Amazon Glacier, an addition to its S3 offerings with lower storage costs than S3 (initially 1 cent per GB). Glacier is intended for long-term archival in cases where retrieval is rare; therefore retrieval is costly and slow. Glacier offers the same durability as the standard S3 offering.[66][67] In December 2016, the price of Glacier is reduced to 0.4 cents per GB.[36] Glacier has been used by governments, corporations, and libraries for low-cost long-term archival.[39] It has also been recommended for use for personal backups when frequent access is not needed.[68][69]
2013April 6Web archivingIn the United Kingdom, the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations come into force, bringing digital and online material under the scope of the UK's legal deposit. Previously, the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 had given the Secretary of State the powers to make regulations governing the deposit of non-print publications, but such regulations were never made at that time.[23][70][71]: 5 
2013April 18DigitizingThe Digital Public Library of America launches.[72]
2013July 1Web archivingGoogle Reader, an RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google, shuts down after having launched in 2005.[73] The shutdown prompts an effort to archive the feed data from the service.[74][75]
2013DecemberWeb archivingThe Memento Project is published as a standard in RFC 7089.[76]
2017AugustWeb archivingThe WARC file format is published as the standard ISO 28500:2017 2nd edition.[77]

See also

References
  1. Dorian Lynskey (May 28, 2015). "How the compact disc lost its shine". The Guardian. Retrieved November 9, 2016. CBS released the world's first commercially available CD, a reissue of Billy Joel's 52nd Street, in Japan in October 1982. Philips missed the production deadline so the international release was put back to March 1983.
  2. Benj Edwards (October 1, 2012). "The CD player turns 30". PCWorld. Retrieved November 9, 2016. On October 1, 1982, Sony ignited a digital audio revolution with the release of the world's first commercial compact disc player, the CDP-101 (above), in Japan.
  3. Patterson, David; Gibson, Garth A.; Katz, Randy (1988). A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) (PDF). SIGMOD Conferences. Retrieved 2006-12-31.
  4. Frank Hayes (November 17, 2003). "The Story So Far". Computerworld. Retrieved November 18, 2016. Patterson recalled the beginnings of his RAID project in 1987. […] 1988: David A. Patterson leads a team that defines RAID standards for improved performance, reliability and scalability.
  5. Peter B. Malcolm (November 13, 1989). "US Patent 5086502: Method of operating a data processing system". Google Patents. Retrieved November 29, 2016. Filing date Nov 13, 1989
  6. Hirtle, Peter B. (c. 2003). "The History and Current State of Digital Preservation in the United States". The earliest reference that I could find in English to the "digital preservation" of data occurs in the context of the research that Anne Kenney and Lynne Personnius undertook in 1990 at the Cornell University Library in conjunction with the Xerox Corporation.
  7. "GNU Wget NEWS – history of user-visible changes". Svn.dotsrc.org. 2005-03-20. Archived from the original on March 13, 2007. Retrieved 2012-12-08. Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of Geturl. This NEWS file is included in source distributions of Wget.
  8. Niksic, Hrvoje (June 24, 1996). "Geturl: Software for non-interactive downloading". comp.infosystems.www.announce. Retrieved November 17, 2016.
  9. "Internet Archive: About IA". Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  10. "Internet Archive: Bios". Internet Archive. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  11. "Alexa Internet - Company Overview". Archived from the original on October 7, 2009. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  12. "Alexa Crawls". Internet Archive. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  13. Donald Waters; John Garrett (1996). Preserving digital information: Report of the task force on archiving of digital information. CLIR. ISBN 1-88733450-5. Retrieved November 15, 2012.
  14. Tibbo, Helen R. (2003). On the Nature and Importance of Archiving in the Digital Age. Advances in Computers. Vol. 57. p. 26. doi:10.1016/S0065-2458(03)57001-2. ISBN 9780120121571.
  15. "Principles and Good Practice for Preserving Data. IHSN Working Paper No 003" (PDF). International Household Survey Network. December 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 20, 2015. Retrieved March 20, 2015.
  16. "History of curl - How curl Became Like This". curl. Retrieved November 17, 2016. Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed. […] HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
  17. Stenberg, Daniel (20 March 2015). "curl, 17 years old today". daniel.haxx.se. Retrieved 20 March 2015.
  18. Roche, Xavier (February 8, 2014). "Re: Full History of HTTrack". HTTrack Forum. Retrieved November 21, 2016. The first release was in May 1998, but only as binaries.
  19. "A Brief History of NDIIPP". The Library of Congress - Digital Preservation. Retrieved December 30, 2016. 2000 - NDIIP legislation is passed
  20. "Internet Archive launches WayBack Machine". Online Burma Library. 2001-10-25. Retrieved 2016-03-13.
  21. Nahas, Michael (2001-10-14). "Parchive: Parity Volume Set specification 1.0". Archived from the original on December 20, 2008. Retrieved 2009-04-07.
  22. Katie Dean (March 16, 2004). "Honey, I Shrunk the URL". Wired. Retrieved November 17, 2016. So the 24-year-old Web developer from Blaine, Minnesota, launched TinyURL.com in January 2002, a free site that converts huge strings of characters into more manageable snippets.
  23. Lepore, Jill (January 26, 2015). "The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 6, 2016. Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress. […] The U.K. has what's known as a legal-deposit law; it requires copies of everything published in Britain to be deposited in the British Library. In 2013, that law was revised to include everything published on the U.K. Web.
  24. Rachel King (March 6, 2014). "How Aaron Levie and his childhood friends built Box into a $2 billion business, without stabbing each other in the back". TechRepublic. Retrieved December 1, 2016. Development for Box, then Box.net, started at the end of 2004, but really got off the ground and went online in 2005 during their sophomore years of college.
  25. Aaron Levie (September 14, 2011). "Commentary: Why we had to leave Seattle to build Box.net". GeekWire. Retrieved December 1, 2016. Box – which now competes with Redmond's very own Microsoft SharePoint – had been started in early '05 from college dorm rooms in California and North Carolina.
  26. Torvalds, Linus (2007-06-10). "Re: fatal: serious inflate inconsistency". git (Mailing list).
  27. Frakes, Dan; Griffiths, Rob (October 20, 2005). "The Secrets of Safari". Macworld. Retrieved November 22, 2016. In older versions of Safari, "saving" a Web page saved only its HTML source code; images and other embedded content were lost. Fortunately, Apple fixed this in Safari 2.0: the Save As command includes a Web Archive option, which saves nearly everything on the page, including images.
  28. Walter, Chip (August 2005). "Kryder's Law". Scientific American. 293 (2): 32–33. Bibcode:2005SciAm.293b..32W. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0805-32. PMID 16053134.
  29. Sawers, Paul (September 2, 2011). "15 tips to get the most out of Google Docs". The Next Web. Retrieved October 29, 2016.
  30. Chang, Emily (October 5, 2005). "eHub Interviews Writely". eHub. Archived from the original on July 22, 2011. Retrieved October 29, 2016.
  31. Dennis Tsang (January 26, 2006). "Writely - The Web Word Processor". Retrieved December 2, 2016. Writely saves all the revisions each time you edit, so that you can go back and see what has been edited at each revision.
  32. Jeff Bonwick (October 31, 2005). "ZFS: The Last Word in Filesystems". Jeff Bonwick's Blog. Retrieved November 22, 2016. And today, 10/31/2005, we integrated into Solaris.
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  40. "Track changes while you edit - Office Support". Microsoft. Retrieved December 1, 2016.
  41. "About Dropbox". Dropbox, Inc. Retrieved 2013-06-03. Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator.
  42. David Shaw. "Paperkey - an OpenPGP key archiver". Retrieved December 2, 2016. Paperkey extracts just those secret bytes and prints them. From the NEWS file of the http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/paperkey-1.4.tar.gz source]: "Noteworthy changes in version 0.5 (2007-09-21) […] Initial release."
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  50. Bergman, Casey (November 8, 2012). "On the Preservation of Published Bioinformatics Code on Github". Retrieved January 4, 2017.
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  52. "Background". Europeana.eu. Archived from the original on January 22, 2011. Retrieved 10 March 2011. 2008 Europeana's prototype is launched on November 20th by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, and the President of the Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
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  59. "Linux 2 6 29". Linux Kernel Newbies. Retrieved November 22, 2016. Linux 2.6.29 kernel released on 23 March 2009. […] Btrfs is a new filesystem developed from scratch following the design principles of filesystems like ZFS, WAFL, etc.
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  61. Fox, Geoff (2009-07-10). "Yahoo Sets the Date of GeoCities' Death". PCMag.com. Retrieved 2010-11-05.
  62. Stone, Biz (April 14, 2010). "Tweet Preservation". Twitter Blog. Retrieved December 5, 2016. It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. […] there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.
  63. "Memento Project wins Digital Preservation Award 2010". December 1, 2010. Retrieved 14 January 2022.
  64. "The Data Liberation Front Delivers Google Takeout". June 28, 2011. Retrieved 13 June 2012.
  65. Snover, Jeffrey (1 August 2012). "Windows Server 2012 released to manufacturing!". Windows Server Blog. Microsoft Corporation. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  66. Mlot, Stephanie (August 21, 2012). "Amazon Launches Glacier Cloud Storage Service". PCMag.com. Ziff Davis, Inc. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
  67. Jeff Barr (August 21, 2012). "Amazon Glacier: Archival Storage for One Penny Per GB Per Month". AWS Blog. Retrieved November 29, 2016.
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  70. "Non-print legal deposit: FAQs". British Library. Retrieved December 6, 2016. As of 6 April 2013, legal deposit also covers material published digitally and online, so that the Legal Deposit Libraries can provide a national archive of the UK's non-print published material, such as websites, blogs, e-journals and CD-ROMs.
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  76. "RFC 7089 - HTTP Framework for Time-Based Access to Resource States -- Memento".
  77. "Iso 28500:2017".
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