Jedi by Knight

As you were watching Rogue One, did you hear a little voice in the back of your head?  Maybe it said something like: “Wait. The Empire doesn’t do cloud storage? All their info is located on Scarif?  And then they just blew it up?”

Then you told that voice to shut up because you were too busy having fun watching an awesome movie to worry about the Empire’s inadequacies in data storage.

But in case you want to explore that line of thought further, check out this post about digital archives in Rogue One (a lesson in what not to do).

Some of the author’s points include:

• the actual physical storage and recovery system is inefficient
• there are no layers of security; once you’re in, you’re in
• the Empire and Rebellion apparently use the same file formats
• ineffective use of metadata

He goes on to point out that the Jedi were no better.  Jocasta Nu, in particular, I always thought was a terrible librarian.  On her watch, whole star systems were deleted from the archives, not to mention that she was totally condescending and unhelpful to the Jedi trying to do research.

Incompetence/stupidity can be lame as a plot device, but I think Star Wars does pretty well with it.  I admit that I did kind of like that Tarkin blew up the archives to cover up everything (and undoubtedly blame it all on Krenic).  The Empire is the kind of government where things don’t have to work well, they just have to work in your favor.