The Digital Archivist of Aleppo: What We Owe to the Mundane Machines
There’s a story from the siege of Aleppo that has little to do with politics and everything to do with the quiet, persistent work of preservation. It’s about a man named Mohammed Kujjah and the city’s endowment archives, a repository of centuries-old property deeds, marriage contracts, and civic records. As war ravaged the city, Kujjah knew this fragile paper was a target. He couldn’t stop the shells, but he could attempt a backup.
His method wasn’t sophisticated. He used a digital camera. He and a small team meticulously photographed page after page, scroll after scroll, under the constant threat of destruction. It was a manual, painstaking, and profoundly boring process. Click, save, move to the next page. For months. There was no automation, no distributed cloud sync, no real-time validation. There was just the repetitive act of capture, driven by the desperate hope that a copy might someday be needed.
This is, in its rawest human form, the absolute core of our work in operations and reliability. We often talk about RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) as cold metrics. Kujjah’s RPO was theoretically terrible—the time between each photo. His RTO was glacial—the time it would take to reassemble a digital facsimile of civic memory. Yet, this imperfect, flawed process was all that stood between a culture and its erasure.
His story reframes our daily grind. That cron job that runs nightly to sync database snapshots to cold storage isn’t just a line in a config file. It’s the modern, automated equivalent of a historian patiently photographing documents in a basement. The unverified backup on a dusty external drive in a drawer is not a failure of procedure; it is a potential lifeline, a single photograph that might be the only one that survives.
Kujjah’s archives were partially destroyed. But the copies survived. They weren’t perfect. Some images were blurry. The metadata was a nightmare. But they existed. They were something. In our pursuit of perfectly orchestrated, fully validated, immutable infrastructure, we must never lose sight of the virtue of simply having *something*. The boring, reliable technology we maintain is not about achieving perfection. It’s about building a legacy of persistence, one mundane, automated task at a time. It’s about ensuring that even if the worst happens, the photographs, in some form, remain.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: