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Documents don't usually preserve themselves. Paper lasts a long time if left in an attic or a closet but can be lost if the wrong person "cleans up". Electron
by jefurii 11y ago
Documents don't usually preserve themselves. Paper lasts a long time if left in an attic or a closet but can be lost if the wrong person "cleans up". Electronic documents are much more fragile. Media decays or otherwise becomes unreadable. If data is saved in proprietary formats and the reader hardware or software is lost, then it's much the same as degaussing.
IIRC a large set of moon landing data was lost when somebody set the tapes down on a heater and left them there too long.
Not moon-landing related, but Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), the very first group to use a Roland TR-808 drum machine, was unable to read the original masters because they were recording using a cutting-edge digital format for which there are no readers.
Preserving digital data for the long term is hard.
Disclaimer: Library and Info Sci degree with archives coursework.
- matheweis 11y agoYes. Even if the tapes had not been erased, it would have been difficult if not impossible to get it back after that amount of time. About 5 years ago I helped a team migrate a bunch of data from ~30 year old 9-track tape reels. Obtaining and restoring hardware that was even capable of reading the reels was hard enough (we are talking spending thousands of dollars purchasing zero-warranty equipment from sketchy places on the 'net that had a few sitting in some dusty corner of their warehouse). We also had to write our own software to read the tapes until an error occurred; reset the drive, retry reading from that spot again, and so on, and then concatenate all of the chucks together. Most of the reels were eventually readable this way, but there still ended up being a not insignificant number that were given up on after several failed attempts.