My recent attempts to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is a good illustration of some of the platform challenges associated with digital preservation planning. The background to this tale is that my lifetime collection of work documents is held in a document management system called Fish which employs an underlying SQL Express database to store the digital documents. The high level index to the collection is contained in a FileMaker database which integrates with Fish via some simple commands. All these pieces of software run on a laptop under the Windows 7 operating system.

Last year, when I first heard about Microsoft’s plan to enable users to upgrade to Windows 10 for free for an initial period, I decided that I would take advantage of the offer but would leave it till close to the cut-off date – which turned out to be the day before yesterday (29Jul2016).  In the intervening months, FileMaker issued yet another new version of its database (15) which I decided to take up (at £280) as my current  version (11) was no longer going to be supported, and I wanted to have a version which I could be sure would work successfully under Windows 10.

With FileMaker 15 in place, I got confirmation from my document management supplier that Fish does work under Windows 10, and so set about preparing to undertake the Win10 upgrade. The upgrade screen informed me that there were no incompatibility problems with any of my software, and my wife had already undertaken the upgrade successfully on her laptop at the first time of asking with the anti-virus programme that we both employ still running, so I thought there was fighting chance that the upgrade might go smoothly. I made a comprehensive set of backups, and set the upgrade going. It failed, giving me the rather cryptic error message 80070004-3000D. I soon discovered that , despite this being such a specific error number, there is no specific reason for failure associated with it. I spent many hours over the following four weeks trawling the net and reading a whole variety of advice from Microsoft and others about this error.

One of the first things I came across alerted me to potential problems with the SQL Express database that I was running. After further research I eliminated that as being a reason for the failure of the upgrade, but I did discover that Microsoft were not going to support the version I am running (2008R2) under Windows 10. I discussed this with my document management system supplier who advised that they had recently performed an upgrade to a later version for a client but that it hadn’t been entirely straightforward. They advised me to delay upgrading the database as long as possible. I checked the net again and found at least one entry saying that SQL Express 2008R2 was working under Windows 10, so I decide to set aside the SQL challenge for the time being.

I subsequently tried out a whole variety of suggestions I found on the net to overcome the error including removing superfluous user profiles; checking that folders such as Programme Files, Programme Data and Users are in the same directory as the OS; running scannow; checking I don’t have a proxy server; checking I have no empty folders in the Start Menu; checking that my computer name is not System or other reserved name and is more than 8 characters long; checking regedit to ensure that OS upgrades are allowed; performing the upgrade in Administrator mode; and creating a new Administrator role and upgrading from that. None of these worked across about 8 upgrade attempts, and each time I got the same 80070004-3000D error message.

Finally the deadline passed, and I was glad to be able to be able to stop the whole very time consuming and frustrating exercise. However, Microsoft was able to deliver a final sting from its very long and uncontrolled tail: I tried to write to them alerting them of my inability to find a solution to 80070004-3000D and asking them to confirm I would still be eligible for a free update if and when I did. I used a box on one of their ‘Contact us’ support screens which said something like ‘describe your problem here’ and which had a NEXT button underneath. I wrote out my problem, but, on pressing the NEXT button, another screen appeared which said ‘this page doesn’t exist’. Highly annoyed, I returned to the previous screen, copied my text, put it in a mail message to myself so it was properly date stamped, printed it out and sent it to the UK Microsoft HQ in Stockley Park. I do not expect to hear back from them.

For now I will continue using Windows 7, and the question of whether and when to upgrade to Windows 10 will become just another platform question that will need to be addressed in the Digital Preservation Planning exercise I intend to embark on for my document collection in the next six months or so.

The DPC webinar on ‘Preservation Planning for Personal Digital Archives’ took place last Wednesday (29th June), and I duly gave my talk to a small select audience of about a dozen people. I believe this included one person from the Bodleian Library, one from the UK Parliamentary archives and two separate groups from the UN Archives and Records group – one based in Long Island and the other in New York.  The Q&A at the end was interesting, but too short – I know I would have enjoyed spending more time talking about practical problems with these professionals. The two questions I can remember both came from the UN groups who are considering providing guidance to UN staff about how to preserve their digital files. The discussion highlighted that the Maintenance Plan I am proposing should eventually result in people not having very old unreadable files because the Maintenance Plan would be ensuring that they are regularly updated.

The full Webinar was recorded and is available via the DPC website at this link http://www.dpconline.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1720:dpc-webinar-preservation-planning-for-personal-digital-archives-with-paul-wilson&catid=33:conference-reports NB. This link no longer works. The webinar is now at the following link – though permissions are required: https://www.dpconline.org/events/past-events/webinars/dpc-webinar-preservation-planning-for-personal-digital-archives

However you may just want to look at the Powerpoint slides that I used which have speaker notes included.

In both the DPC paper and the webinar, I made it clear that I was looking for collaborators to apply the Preservation Planning process to my document collection; and a repository for the collection. Now that I’ve been able to publicise these wants through these DPC activities, I’m hoping that I might hear from someone who is interested. However, whether or not any such people emerge, I’m aiming to start the Preservation Planning work on my document collection towards the end of this year or early next – that will be the next phase of my digital preservation adventure.

The DPC is running a webinar on the contents of my paper on 29^th June, and yesterday I completed the slides for it. With that done, I am completely up to date with all of my Journey activities and this left me feeling unburdened and relaxed.

By chance, yesterday was also the day on which Richard Harper, a sociologist colleague from my CSCW days, dropped in for a chat. I’d come across Richard’s name in a paper I’d read in the course of my investigation into Digital Age Artefacts. The paper recounted insightful work into what people actually kept in their houses – highly relevant to stuff I’m doing – and I remember Richard as being a particularly interesting person to talk to. I looked him up on the web and discovered he had spent many years at the Microsoft Research Centre in Cambridge in the Socio-Digital Systems Group, investigating topics such as the myth of the paperless office and  communications in the digital age. I got to thinking that it would be great to talk to him to get a different take on what I’d been doing and what I might do next. I managed to reach him through his blog and we arranged for him to call in here in Lavendon on his way home from a trip to Chipping Norton (the scene of the three CSCW meetings which he and I attended in the early 90s). Before he arrived I spent an hour listening to four or five of his talks on YouTube, and then we had a very pleasant couple of hours discussing digitisation stuff over lunch.

It was good to see Richard again – and very kind of him to spend the time with me. As a result I have all sorts of new thoughts and perspectives rolling round my head which I know will take a few weeks to work through and take shape. Our conversation was the perfect opportunity to reassess what I’m doing before I set out on the next phases of these journeys. An immediate thought that shines through, though, is that perhaps I should treat my future ventures to make use of the digital artefacts I have collected, as though they were one of the treasure hunt type games that I have occasionally devised for my family. i.e. things that are occasional and intriguing and fun.

So, yesterday certainly felt like a memorable staging post in the things I have been doing. Oh, and by the way, as I write this I’m discovering that this morning appears to be a staging post in the UK’s journey – we appear to have voted to leave the European Union…

The DPC press release announcing the availability of my paper on it’s website, was issued today. It’s contents are below:

‘Preservation Planning for Personal Digital Collections’ Case Note and Toolset by Paul Wilson is now available on the DPC website.

Paul Wilson, formerly of the Office Systems Division at The National Computing Centre, has contributed a new addition to the Case Notes now available on the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) website.

In this new Case Note, Paul narrates his attempts to create a preservation plan for a small personal collection. In the fuller article (which can be downloaded as a PDF), he outlines his experiences to provide insights into the practical outcomes of using published guidelines and tools for preservation planning. Since he could find no preservation planning process appropriate to individuals, Paul obtained a slide set detailing a simple preservation workflow from the Digital Preservation Coalition, and used that as a foundation on which to establish an approach to the work.

This general approach and accompanying documentation was tested and refined on two of his personal digital collections (one of 800 mementos and the other of 17,000 photos).

“I recounted my PDF experiences not to alert others to specifics about PDF (about which I know very little) or the eCopy software (which I am generally very pleased with),” he explains, “but to illustrate how complicated and time-consuming work on file formats can be.”

The detailed account of his research and preliminary trials provides a set of guidance for any individual or institution looking to preserve their own small, digital collection. Paul has also provided the documents he created from scoping to maintaining his collection, along with blank template versions that can be easily used and adapted by others. All of the documents, as well as blank templates, are available to download as a Toolset.

This case note also appears in the DPC’s Technology Watch Report Personal Digital Archiving by Gabriela Redwine

*Apologies for cross posting*

Sarah Middleton, Head of Communications and Advocacy, Digital Preservation Coalition, 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working with Sara Thomson in the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), to get my paper revised and on to the DPC web site. That work was duly completed last Monday and the paper is now accessible on the DPC website in the Publications/Case Studies section at http://www.dpconline.org/advice/case-notes. Publishing the paper on a website is much better than having it in a conventional journal because the web publication makes it easy to provide the template documents as downloadable attachments that people can use. Let’s hope there are some takers. I’ve also been able to add a section at the end explaining that I am seeking a permanent repository for my PAWDOC collection and/or callaborators to apply the digital preservation process described in the paper, to the PAWDOC collection.

The DPC will be sending out a press release about the paper in the next few days to various mailing lists; and, beyond that, I believe the DPC want to arrange a webinar sometime in the next few months to air the contents of the paper. I’m hoping that all this publicity may spark some interest in the PAWDOC collection.