3 ms·

Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as pl

Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as plain paper. There are books that have survived a millennium or more, yet my CDs from 15 years ago no longer work and the CD is almost dead. That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.

namibj 8y ago
If you cared, you could have expected that lifetime for the CD-R you talk about. The effect that hit your discs, is not one that hits tape or BD-R (except LTH). It is actually more closely related to Flash, i.e. USB sticks/SSDs/memory cards. The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper. The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light). None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand. Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.

3 ms·

Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as pl

by bad_user 8y ago

namibj 8y ago
If you cared, you could have expected that lifetime for the CD-R you talk about. The effect that hit your discs, is not one that hits tape or BD-R (except LTH). It is actually more closely related to Flash, i.e. USB sticks/SSDs/memory cards. The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper. The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light). None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand. Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.