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Every time I buy a new computer I find the old hard disk fits in its entirety on the new one, leaving me with plenty of space to spare. I think I have four or

Every time I buy a new computer I find the old hard disk fits in its entirety on the new one, leaving me with plenty of space to spare. I think I have four or five generations nested into the current one. I suspect storage will remain cheap enough most of these artifacts will survive, but it's going to be very difficult for future researchers to get a good idea of what 21st century life was like because the crap to content ratio is so high. Sorting through all those kitten videos and posts hardly anyone reads today will probably be more expensive and time consuming than it's worth.

mod 9y ago
Eventually you'll lose your drive, and therefore data if you don't backup. In 58,000 years none of the data would be intact if not through pretty extreme efforts to preserve it. I guess maybe we'll find ways to encode data onto physical media, but I don't think my facebook (or HN) posts are going to make the cut.
- tryingagainbro 9y ago
  >> "Eventually you'll lose your drive, and therefore data if you don't backup." True, but someone will come up with a "databank" of sorts. Who knows, we might backup on DNA or space, as in cosmos. Is what we type right now escaping in space like TV transmissions? Any physics major here?
  - Retra 9y ago
    Some of it goes into space (if it's transmitted the right way), but most will be drowned in noise. None of that matters though, since you can't get in front of the outgoing signal to receive it at a future date. It would have to be reflected, which would also introduce a large amount of noise.
    - tryingagainbro 9y ago
      Thanks makes sense. We see what is coming to us, and maybe nothing will be reflected considering expansion and all. BUT it is out there and an advanced civilization might figure it out (not that they might need it but curiosity)
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  This is a lot of people losing their drivers in a relatively short time. No generation had a life so well preserved as we have. Whatever we can reconstruct about previous generations lives, future archeologists will get hundreds of times more.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  One day we will have cheap, reliable, ubiquitous digital storage that we don't even think about. Future archaeology will be about digital spelunking and untangling of massive amounts of data that isn't properly catalogued or given context.
ksk 9y ago
I wonder how much of this information will be freely-exportable and copy able in the future. Or will we be stuck in "app silos" where all your information is tried to the App's data store and you can't get at it. If I'm using instagram for all of my pictures, will I always be able to take them with me when I migrate to a different platform/device?
twobyfour 9y ago
And how much of that data is in outdated formats that it's now almost impossible to read? If I could still find my middle school papers written using WordPerfect 5.1 or MS Write, and if the floppies were still legible, would I be able to open them in software that runs on my current operating system without emulation? How long would it take to find something to read them with? And that's with very common software from only a quarter of a century ago! Heck, I've got files written in niche Mac OS X software from less than a decade ago that probably can no longer be read on a computer manufactured this year.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Thats precisely why we should only use Free and Open document formats. They have a much higher likelihood to make it in the long term.
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    In the long term of tens of years, MAYBE that helps. My guess is that ODF, for instance, will be harder to find readers for 50 years from now than DOCX will. In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language. OK, maybe plain text ASCII could be decoded by cryptographers highly familiar with Ancient English. You might look up the Long Now project and how they're thinking about communicating 10,000 years into the future.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      > In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language. Sorry, but if there is any kind of document specification left, it should be trivial for whoever is left then (as long as they can grasp our 21th century plain language) to recreate a reader for an old format. With proprietary documents, that is just never going to be possible.
ekianjo 9y ago
That hard drive storage expansion you have experienced in the past few times is not sustainable. Hard disk platters are reaching a limit. SSD could beat that but they are way more expensive than HDD for the same storage space.
- ddnb 9y ago
  And this spot in time is where history will end? SSD is at this time more expensive, storage expansion will go slower until the next breakthrough.
gehwartzen 9y ago
Instead of being versed in soil strata classifications and tool markings I suspect the archeologist of the 22nd century will be taught old compression systems and methods of connecting IDE cables to quantum machines.

mod 9y ago

Eventually you'll lose your drive, and therefore data if you don't backup. In 58,000 years none of the data would be intact if not through pretty extreme efforts to preserve it. I guess maybe we'll find ways to encode data onto physical media, but I don't think my facebook (or HN) posts are going to make the cut.

tryingagainbro 9y ago
>> "Eventually you'll lose your drive, and therefore data if you don't backup." True, but someone will come up with a "databank" of sorts. Who knows, we might backup on DNA or space, as in cosmos. Is what we type right now escaping in space like TV transmissions? Any physics major here?
- Retra 9y ago
  Some of it goes into space (if it's transmitted the right way), but most will be drowned in noise. None of that matters though, since you can't get in front of the outgoing signal to receive it at a future date. It would have to be reflected, which would also introduce a large amount of noise.
  - tryingagainbro 9y ago
    Thanks makes sense. We see what is coming to us, and maybe nothing will be reflected considering expansion and all. BUT it is out there and an advanced civilization might figure it out (not that they might need it but curiosity)
marcosdumay 9y ago
This is a lot of people losing their drivers in a relatively short time. No generation had a life so well preserved as we have. Whatever we can reconstruct about previous generations lives, future archeologists will get hundreds of times more.
Waterluvian 9y ago
One day we will have cheap, reliable, ubiquitous digital storage that we don't even think about. Future archaeology will be about digital spelunking and untangling of massive amounts of data that isn't properly catalogued or given context.

ksk 9y ago

I wonder how much of this information will be freely-exportable and copy able in the future. Or will we be stuck in "app silos" where all your information is tried to the App's data store and you can't get at it. If I'm using instagram for all of my pictures, will I always be able to take them with me when I migrate to a different platform/device?

twobyfour 9y ago

And how much of that data is in outdated formats that it's now almost impossible to read? If I could still find my middle school papers written using WordPerfect 5.1 or MS Write, and if the floppies were still legible, would I be able to open them in software that runs on my current operating system without emulation? How long would it take to find something to read them with? And that's with very common software from only a quarter of a century ago! Heck, I've got files written in niche Mac OS X software from less than a decade ago that probably can no longer be read on a computer manufactured this year.

ekianjo 9y ago
Thats precisely why we should only use Free and Open document formats. They have a much higher likelihood to make it in the long term.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  In the long term of tens of years, MAYBE that helps. My guess is that ODF, for instance, will be harder to find readers for 50 years from now than DOCX will. In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language. OK, maybe plain text ASCII could be decoded by cryptographers highly familiar with Ancient English. You might look up the Long Now project and how they're thinking about communicating 10,000 years into the future.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    > In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language. Sorry, but if there is any kind of document specification left, it should be trivial for whoever is left then (as long as they can grasp our 21th century plain language) to recreate a reader for an old format. With proprietary documents, that is just never going to be possible.

ekianjo 9y ago

That hard drive storage expansion you have experienced in the past few times is not sustainable. Hard disk platters are reaching a limit. SSD could beat that but they are way more expensive than HDD for the same storage space.

ddnb 9y ago
And this spot in time is where history will end? SSD is at this time more expensive, storage expansion will go slower until the next breakthrough.

gehwartzen 9y ago

Instead of being versed in soil strata classifications and tool markings I suspect the archeologist of the 22nd century will be taught old compression systems and methods of connecting IDE cables to quantum machines.