Archive Copies

There was a massive computer server failure in my research lab this week. What started out as a routine hard drive swap a couple of weeks ago, which went smoothly, somehow went awry. The server was set up with a RAID 5 array. It had been stable for years, but we discovered one hard drive had failed during the move last summer when the lab was renovated. Since this was just before the Fall semester started, and everything was operational, I decided not to replace it yet. That’s the beauty of RAID. (Side note: the server is named “beauty”, replacing an old server named “beast” although beauty is more of a beast in terms of size and power). Everything still runs fine even if you lose a hard drive. So while still in winter break, a couple of weeks ago, we swapped hard drives and allowed the RAID to rebuild itself incorporating the new hard drive. Everything looked good.

This past Monday morning, I found the server completely down with orange blinking lights everywhere. It would not come back up even with the help of several systems administrators. The timing was particularly bad because it was the first week of classes, and I was also starting to train my new research students that same morning. Thankfully, I could get the workstations off NIS, create local accounts, and the students were able to proceed with learning Linux and the computational chemistry software. Most of the computations are done on clusters separate from my local lab server, so the students were able to proceed with their projects. I had moved most of my important data off the local server some time ago, so I won’t lose too much if we are not able to revive the server. The problem with RAID is that when it fails, it fails badly. This got me thinking about how one goes about making copies and archiving data, both in our world and in the magical world.

In days of yore, there were etchings on clay, stone, bone and whatever else worked. Parchment and Paper made their debut a few thousand years ago. How was information preserved for future generations? You could etch it into your city walls or on a large imposing obelisk. The ancient equivalent of a photograph might be a carved statue. You could store scrolls in jars of clay and hide them in dry caves. Making copies was tedious. You needed human copyists. What better way to keep monks occupied or to educate the young by having them write out copies. Learning by rote was an important part of your education – you wrote out your own “textbooks” as the teacher recited the lesson.

Let’s fast forward to my lifetime. My first job as a copyist was in first grade. My teacher had a son in second-grade who came down with what I think was mumps, and therefore had to miss something like two weeks of class. (My memory is rather hazy.) Apparently I had a faster-than-average writing speed because my teacher would send me to her son’s class to copy down what was on the blackboard there halfway through the lesson. My teacher was a fierce woman, so as a seven-year old I simply did as instructed. I vaguely remember being paid ten or twenty cents per day. (I didn’t ask to be paid nor did I negotiate the salary.) I didn’t understand what I was writing, but I was good at copying. My writing must have been quite legible then, because several years later I had a teacher toss my written exercises out the window as a punishment for terrible handwriting. I attribute it to learning cursive and writing at increased speeds to finish my work as fast possible so I could go play.

My mother was also a school-teacher (at a different school) and I was drafted to help make copies. By that I mean using a typewriter to prepare a stencil. I’d like to attribute it to my relatively fast two-finger typing that was for the most part error-free. But it could have simply been one of the ways of keeping me out of trouble. I learned that the stencil would then go into a cyclostyle machine, and out would come the copies! I vaguely remember what the cyclostyle looked like – it is probably what one would call a mimeograph here in the U.S. Thankfully, when I became a teacher, we had Xerox machines. And now? I can just submit a print-and-copy job directly to the multi-function printer down the hall. At my leisure I can walk over and pick up the copies. Unless of course there’s a printer jam. Then I get irritated, especially if it was caused by the previous person’s job. (I’m sure this has happened to you too!)

Before the Wonderful World of the Wide Web, information to be learned was safely archived in physical textbooks. Since I am technically a Physical Chemist, I have a bunch of physical Physical Chemistry textbooks! Above is a snapshot of the appropriate shelf in my office. There were no e-textbooks when I started teaching, and students despaired of lugging their heavy textbooks around. When the publisher sent me a second (gratis) copy of the textbook, I put it in the student lounge with the promise from my students that it would not leave the lounge. Everyone followed this rule, and no one stole the textbook, but fat heavy P-Chem textbooks aren’t theft-worthy. More trouble than they are worth, perhaps? I’m sure some of my students thought so.

The principle of the Xerox machine for photocopying information isn’t too different from the mimeograph. You need ink, paper, and an apparatus that puts the ink in the right places on the paper per the master copy. In fact for most any physical object manufactured in bulk, you have the appropriate industrial machine that can produce these with the appropriate starting materials and molds. Robots easily do the task on an assembly line today. In biological replication (which is all biochemistry!) exquisite molecular machines work in harmony to assemble new genetic information, new proteins, new cellular materials, leading to new organisms, with an intricacy far exceeding any of our macroscopic machinery.

Today, information is increasingly stored as 1’s and 0’s on microchips. They are easy to move and easy to copy – perhaps too easy, thanks to the lightning speed of electrons. And while microchips and hard drives are physical objects that will slowly degrade over time, the digitally stored information can be cheaply, easily and quickly moved. Backup, Backup, Backup! (I almost lost most of my undergraduate thesis shortly before printing when my floppy became “corrupted”, but thankfully I had a backup on a lab computer that no one had erased yet.)

Do we even need physical books anymore? The Kindle and other modern tablets running on silicon rather than etchings on silica are starting to displace the physical book. Just think how many books you can carry on your sleek device? A library’s worth! At least for textbooks, we are starting to see increasingly better open-source materials. In one of my classes, I am only using Open Education Resources as part of a library initiative. We’ll see how the students take to my curated list. In scientific research, digital publishing of journal articles has clearly won out over print. The fight for e-advertising space and bandwidth drives billions of dollars of commerce today.

Thanks to computers, microchips and the channeling of electricity, we’ve migrated to a large extent to digital electronic storage and duplication. But in the magical world of Harry Potter, where home electronics (among other devices) interfere with magic, it seems to be old-school: paper, quills, ink and books. How are books duplicated? Is there a magical duplication spell? This is unclear. In Book 7, at the home of Xenophilius Lovegood, Harry spots a printing press described as a “wooden object covered in magically turning cogs and wheels”. The machine still seems to be required, although it is run magically. (We could replace magic with a robot in our world.) When Harry breaks into the Ministry of Magic, he sees hard-at-work employees. “They were all waving and twiddling their wands in unison, and squares of colored paper were flying in every direction… what he was watching was the creation on pamphlets – that the paper squares were pages, which, when assembled, folded, and magicked into place, fell into neat stacks…” It isn’t clear if the ministry employees use magic directly to “ink” the pamphlets, or if they were just assembling inked pages.

Do textbooks have to be printed the “old”-fashioned way? In Book 6, when Harry and Ron are without their Advanced Potions textbooks, they have to order new copies. No one attempts to magically duplicate an existing textbook. Is there a Wizarding Law that prevents duplication? To protect certain commercial interests? Or is there something inherently difficult in magicking a permanent duplication? (One could temporarily Transfigure an object to look like another, I suppose.) Can you easily copy an essay of a fellow Hogwarts student using magic? You can magically change words around as Roonil Wazlib proves. Rita Skeeter uses a Quick-Quotes Quill. Could one attach such a quill to a polygraph (magical, of course) and produce a duplicate piece of writing?

If copying information is challenging in the magical world, how about storing information? Certainly there are books and magical diaries. One could enchant ink to be permanent or make a book impervious to most types of decay and destruction. There are magical ways of extracting and storing a memory, and then viewing it in a pensieve. These memories are archive copies. Some that are deemed important (such as a significant prophecy) are stored in the ministry. What about a Horcrux? By splitting his soul, isn’t Voldemort making archive copies of himself? Or is it more than just an archive? Perhaps like a RAID array. You might destroy one Horcrux but nothing of significance is lost. Do the other Horcruxes redistribute the bits and bytes of his soul?

One problem with Voldy’s approach is that his Horcruxes are localized, thus leading to his destruction in a massive failure of Horcruxes. What if you could upload your essence into the “cloud”? A distributed array of supercomputers houses Will Caster in the movie Transendence; it is much, much more difficult to kill such a being. It just keeps coming back to life, like Skynet in Terminator sequels. Somehow though, the heroes are always able to find the link causing the system to fail and fail badly; perhaps never to recover. We’ll see if that happens to my system. I’d like to be able to bring it up temporarily just to get some data off. Thinking that this was just a simple hard drive swap, I forgot my own rule of Backup, Backup, Backup! I admit feeling a moment of dread that parts of my life are at the mercy of metal boxes with wires and chips, and a desire to “get off the grid”. Then reality struck back, and I decided to write this blog post. Hmmm… I wonder where my blog is archived.