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> It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides... Not that I disagree with you, but thi

> It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides... Not that I disagree with you, but this is an interesting point. I've heard archivists argue that with simpler analog storage, the curve for corrupt bits vs interpretability is smoothish, but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore"

evincarofautumn 8y ago
> with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore" Digital anything, really. Analog signals degrade somewhat gracefully—you have to explicitly build error correction into a digital signal. A relatively recent example of a bungled transition from analog to digital: when the US switched to digital television in 2009, my family suddenly and completely lost many local/lower-powered/more distant stations that we used to be able to get with just a little static or distortion. And the channels we continued to get wou— —ut out occasio— —in a really a—oying wa— and became unwatchable (well, unlistenable).
coldtea 8y ago
>but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore" That's not inherent in digital copies though. It depends on how much redundancy one adds. We've had self-correction codes that sacrifice size for redundancy and reliability since forever, even in simple formats like ZIP and RAR archives. And with digital one can always make like 10 copies in the same disk too. If one is unreadable due to single bit flipped or a whole sector, some of the others will still be fine.