Lots of offsite backups

[behold, another half-baked post]

The Register says that NASA will on Thursday release 'greatly improved' footage from the Apollo 11 landing. They speculate that this footage is derived from original tapes of the landing, which in 2006 NASA admitted having lost.

I hope NASA makes the new video freely available for download. If they do, they'll get thousands (millions?) of offsite backups for free, hosted by history buffs around the world. And they won't need to worry so much about losing the originals again.

The Library of Congress has already done something similar with the nation's library, e.g. by posting images to Flickr.

Granted, backups are useless if you can't restore them. It should be easy to put out a call for well-known documents such as the lunar landing videos. But LoC has all kinds of documents ranging from famous to obscure, and retrieving them by broadcasting a call to volunteers would be dicey at best.

So it's interesting to see that LoC is launching a pilot program "to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content."