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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 a
by 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 agoI 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 agoIt'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"