What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.
But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
Things like tape drives and optical storage etc. Even if they have lifespans measured in decades (and these things typically don’t) that still means they have short life spans in terms of being recoverable in the future. A hundred years from now these things won’t be restorable.
I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn’t even know optical was used professionally, and found the term “optical jukebox” to be hilarious :)
But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.
*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn’t particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.
an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained)
I mean, this is really my point. This stuff isn’t going to be maintained forever and will eventually be lost - even if it takes 100 years or more. This idea of future archaeologists troweling their way through Facebook posts isn’t going to happen.
Even much of what we know about the first civilizations in Mesopotamia is only because their clay tablets - which were never intended to be permanent records of anything - were accidentally fired and buried when their storage facilities caught fire. It’s possible that some modern forms of media might be accidentally preserved and restored somehow thousands of years in the future, but it’s a bit hard to imagine such a scenario. Especially when we’re going to cook ourselves off the planet before then.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.
But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.
Things like tape drives and optical storage etc. Even if they have lifespans measured in decades (and these things typically don’t) that still means they have short life spans in terms of being recoverable in the future. A hundred years from now these things won’t be restorable.
I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn’t even know optical was used professionally, and found the term “optical jukebox” to be hilarious :)
https://www.nist.gov/publications/digital-evidence-preservation-considerations-evidence-handlers
But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.
*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn’t particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.
I mean, this is really my point. This stuff isn’t going to be maintained forever and will eventually be lost - even if it takes 100 years or more. This idea of future archaeologists troweling their way through Facebook posts isn’t going to happen.
Even much of what we know about the first civilizations in Mesopotamia is only because their clay tablets - which were never intended to be permanent records of anything - were accidentally fired and buried when their storage facilities caught fire. It’s possible that some modern forms of media might be accidentally preserved and restored somehow thousands of years in the future, but it’s a bit hard to imagine such a scenario. Especially when we’re going to cook ourselves off the planet before then.