Recently I found a forgotten disc that I received from Todd Karr’s Miracle Factory for my patience in waiting for one book or another to be delivered. It’s titled Annemann’s Enigma and I believe the contents that became a portion of the book of the same name. I don’t remember if I mentioned it before but Annemann is one of my favorite characters in magic history. I spent a few years working with my friends reading and analyzing Annemann’s Jinx. I took the disc to our Mac and found much to my dismay that bit rot had struck. It was no longer readable and the PDFs were unavailable.
I have to admit that until I asked my tech savvy friend, Gordon, what had happened, I was unaware of bit rot. From experience I knew VHS tapes degraded after some years but I was naive about CDs, DVDs, and hard-drives. Looking into it, I found that bit rot will eventually strike all computer storage systems. Like our own demise, it’s inevitable.
I suddenly realized that bit rot will strike a decade or more of magic DVDs and downloads. All of this material will eventually be lost to future generations. This is sad to think about as there’s creations and performances that will forgotten.
I suppose this is a great argument for books but it’s not my intent. Awareness of the problem is the first step to a solution. My solution is to move as much as I can to a drive that I can backup. However eventually this too will become unusable.
Everything put together
©1971 Words and Music by Paul Simon
Sooner or later falls apart
There’s nothing to it, nothing to it
And you can cry
You can lie
For all the good it’ll do you
You can die
But when it’s done
And the police come, and they lay you down for dead
Oh, just remember what I said
