4 ms·

We've got a lot more than that for medieval Europe - archaeological remains of more commonplace objects, business and administrative records (oh lord the things

We've got a lot more than that for medieval Europe - archaeological remains of more commonplace objects, business and administrative records (oh lord the things you can learn from an inventory sheet or an invoice), etc.

cultus 7y ago
Not necessarily. The vast majority of recording media we have are not nearly as robust as stone or vellum. Not much outside of archival paper will survive.
- freehunter 7y ago
  While that's true, the vast majority of things we record are not worth keeping for long time frames. There's still a lot of stuff that gets printed on metals, stones, archival media, etc. Not to mention we have modern archival methods that didn't exist back then. Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth, we'll still be passing vastly more information on to future generations than previous generations ever did.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    I assume there are other archives like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc... Designed to withstand 70s nuclear war scenarios, among other things. Stores about 1 billion 35 mm images at the moment.
  - est31 7y ago
    > Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth Many archives are not replicated, at least not including all important pieces. Also note that what's worth keeping vs what's unimportant might change over time. Bach and Vivaldi only became famous after their death. I don't say that everything should be preserved forever, just that it's kept in mind.
    - azernik 7y ago
      Right now, Spotify and Apple Music and Google Play are holding on to recordings, in hundreds of replicas, of garage bands who've only been heard by 1000 people in their whole history. If one of those services goes out of businesses, there are others. Archivists like the Library of Congress use in-house solutions comparable to S3 Glacier or Google Archival Storage, where use of longer-lived media and copying to new media is cheap enough to preserve fantastic amounts of information. A caveat - though the risk of losing art due to loss or destruction of physical media is lower than ever, we still have to contend with intentional destruction of copies by the creator, for business or security reasons.
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      r/datahorders would like to have a word with you. Also the internet archive, the Google art/book projects, Wikipedia, etc.
est31 7y ago
Those business and administrative records were kept on paper which lives for a long time. Now they are transitioning to computers and while it's easy to store all business transactions of a business on an usb-stick, that usb-stick, and basically any digital storage medium we have now, deteriorates over time and will become unreadable in a matter of decades. There is research on digital storage mediums that have archival capabilities. I hope that they will become cheap enough to get into widespread use. Note though that claims for archival capabilities and actually having archival capabilities are different things. We might wake up one day, realizing that the technology we used to store data for the long term actually deteriorated more quickly than we thought, with tons of stuff lost. The only way to combat that is to use multiple different technologies.
- brokencode 7y ago
  I don’t really see the point in some fancy archival medium when so much data now is already stored in cloud-based servers with redundancy and constant hardware maintenance on a global scale. I think there would have to be an apocalyptic event to cause knowledge about significant events, people, and ideas to be lost. Paper and archeological history is absolutely riddled with holes, which doesn’t speak well of its durability.
  - drewbug 7y ago
    It's not always clear what data will be significant in the future, and we don't want the memory of the present to be inordinately selected by those who can afford server upkeep. “He who controls the past, controls the future"

cultus 7y ago

Not necessarily. The vast majority of recording media we have are not nearly as robust as stone or vellum. Not much outside of archival paper will survive.

freehunter 7y ago
While that's true, the vast majority of things we record are not worth keeping for long time frames. There's still a lot of stuff that gets printed on metals, stones, archival media, etc. Not to mention we have modern archival methods that didn't exist back then. Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth, we'll still be passing vastly more information on to future generations than previous generations ever did.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  I assume there are other archives like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc... Designed to withstand 70s nuclear war scenarios, among other things. Stores about 1 billion 35 mm images at the moment.
- est31 7y ago
  > Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth Many archives are not replicated, at least not including all important pieces. Also note that what's worth keeping vs what's unimportant might change over time. Bach and Vivaldi only became famous after their death. I don't say that everything should be preserved forever, just that it's kept in mind.
  - azernik 7y ago
    Right now, Spotify and Apple Music and Google Play are holding on to recordings, in hundreds of replicas, of garage bands who've only been heard by 1000 people in their whole history. If one of those services goes out of businesses, there are others. Archivists like the Library of Congress use in-house solutions comparable to S3 Glacier or Google Archival Storage, where use of longer-lived media and copying to new media is cheap enough to preserve fantastic amounts of information. A caveat - though the risk of losing art due to loss or destruction of physical media is lower than ever, we still have to contend with intentional destruction of copies by the creator, for business or security reasons.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    r/datahorders would like to have a word with you. Also the internet archive, the Google art/book projects, Wikipedia, etc.

est31 7y ago

Those business and administrative records were kept on paper which lives for a long time. Now they are transitioning to computers and while it's easy to store all business transactions of a business on an usb-stick, that usb-stick, and basically any digital storage medium we have now, deteriorates over time and will become unreadable in a matter of decades. There is research on digital storage mediums that have archival capabilities. I hope that they will become cheap enough to get into widespread use. Note though that claims for archival capabilities and actually having archival capabilities are different things. We might wake up one day, realizing that the technology we used to store data for the long term actually deteriorated more quickly than we thought, with tons of stuff lost. The only way to combat that is to use multiple different technologies.

brokencode 7y ago
I don’t really see the point in some fancy archival medium when so much data now is already stored in cloud-based servers with redundancy and constant hardware maintenance on a global scale. I think there would have to be an apocalyptic event to cause knowledge about significant events, people, and ideas to be lost. Paper and archeological history is absolutely riddled with holes, which doesn’t speak well of its durability.
- drewbug 7y ago
  It's not always clear what data will be significant in the future, and we don't want the memory of the present to be inordinately selected by those who can afford server upkeep. “He who controls the past, controls the future"