6 ms·

We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.

by wbl 7y ago

yoz-y 7y ago
At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago. Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Digital media evidence stark access problems even over the course of a few years or decades. We do have century-plus-old digital media archives -- the Hollerith card was invented for use on the 1880 US Census. Paper, punched-tape, mag-tape (I've held steel rolls, they're ... fairly massive), and numerous hard and floppy-drive formats have come ... and gone. The advantages of ink on paper (or chisled stone or stylused clay) is that the reading itself is unmediated. That is, once a person is trained in how to read symbols, a task we're reasonably competent at accomplishing by about age 12 for 95%+ of the population, if not earlier and more, the content itself is simply readable. Digital formats require decoding, dedicated readers, interfaces, power supplies, often device drivers and quite frequently data format decoding as well. This is a significant issue, with considerable resources dedicated to it: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov http://www.digitalpreservation.gov https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/preservation-issues https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/pres... https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserving-our-future-the-importance-of-digital-preservation https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserv... (This discussion occurs as I'm working on updating content on the Google+ exodus and access to, or lack, content stored (or not) in the Internet Archive from that now-defunct, but still providing HTTP-200 responses, website.)
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Correction: 1890 census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 Though antecedents existed dating to the 18th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
- fourthark 7y ago
  Or as long as the service you bought it from cares to support it. (Granted, Project Gutenberg is probably as immortal as you describe. Kindle less so.)
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  And there probably will not be any hard drives in a thousand years from now. Books are not as flammable as all that and generally survive higher temperatures than magnetic disks can. And books are generally printed in thousands of copies so they are replicated and distributed too. They also don't suffer to the same extent from technological change. It is now rather difficult to find computers that have floppy disk drives for instance, parallel ATA is also not especially common either. In addition magnetic media is not as robust even at normal temperatures. So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable. In principle you might be right but it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    > it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results. Funny, that’s exactly the role monks used to play in keeping many of these afforementioned documents readable. And “less flammable” matters little when we’re talking about house or library fires, during which sufficient heat to make iron pliable can be easily achieved. The advantage of digital backups there is that the (well planned) backups don’t live in the same place as the original. And since we’re talking about Mass Market paperbacks, can we talk about how fragile those things are these days? Sure, one from 30+ years ago is in decent condition - probably better condition than a new one hot off the press. The glue they use anymore is terrible - having pages fall out during the first read is pretty commonplace anymore. I’d give better odds to a 30 year old paperback that’s lasted this long than a new book to make it another 30 years.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The reason monks played a role in the hand-transcribing (and error-inducing) manu scripts was because mechanical reproduction didn't exist. Estimates are that in all of Europe as of 1400 there were on the order of 40,000 titles or editions, and about 15 million volumes, total. A large library might have a few thousand volumes (University of Paris ~1200 CE: 2,000, the Vatican, ~1400, ~5,000). As of 1800, the British Museum (now the British Library) contained only 50,000 volumes. Individual books, scrolls, parchments, and cuneiform tablets (https://cdli.ucla.edu https://cdli.ucla.edu) can survive thousands of years. The larger problem for more recent woodpulp paper texts is one that's common to many digital storage media: poor chemical stability. Acid-treated paper will crumble to dust. Archival-grade cotton rag will last centuries or more. So long as you're talking flame and heat, you might care to check the ratings of your CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDD, and SDD media before feeling too secure. Quality of current-gen paper print media is indeed low. Hardcover, for a price, delivers markedly better durability. Keep in mind too that you're applying survivorship bias to your sampling of 30-year-old paperbacks -- the ones that wouldn't survive 30 years ... haven't. (I've numerous old books which are now in pretty sorry condition. And others which remain robust. Details matter.)
- angrygoat 7y ago
  Yes, but look what happened when we tried to digitise and preserve a 1000 year old book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
  - neurobro 7y ago
    > They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public. > ... > It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms). Copyright is a huge impediment to the long-term preservation of digital cultural artifacts, mitigated by the people's willingness (and technical ability, for now) to ignore it.
    - Brave-Steak 7y ago
      Projects like this should be "hacked" and the data released into the wild. It's insane that we so willingly lock up vast amounts of culture and media behind copyright law which hasn't even been around in its current form for 100 years, yet its impact will be felt for centuries to come.
- gambiting 7y ago
  That only works if someone puts in the effort to actually keep copying this data. Personal anecdote time: I work for a large games developer, at a studio that has existed for 30 years now. Recently we've dug out some archived material for the very first games the studio worked on, and guess what? It's nearly all lost. 9/10 floppies don't read at all. As far as we can tell, the source code for those original games from 1990-1995 is completely lost because we can't read any of the source media. Even some later archives are useless, I have a full spindle of Kodak CD-R discs burnt in 1998 and literally none of them read, the underside has turned translucent, never seen that before. Some other brands(Sony, TDK) survived a lot better and most of those CDs still read, but if we left this work for another 10-20 years it would probably all be gone completely. And then guess what has survived absolutely fine? All design documents actually printed on paper. Actual drawings, notes, scribbles from designers - all of that we have and it's perfectly readable. But source code saved digitally is gone. It's a massive shame really.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    You didn't print the documentation on a thermal printer? I have lost documentation because it was printed on thermo paper which degrades in months.
- catalogia 7y ago
  In a thousand years, how many of the hard drives dug up will be encrypted?
BurningFrog 7y ago
Those are some very rare exceptions, if we're going to take this argument seriously. Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.
- wbl 7y ago
  That is incorrect. The big loss was papyrus to vellum where the monks had to make hard choices. Anything written on vellum was expensive so carefully prserved: there weren't a lot of books.
  - bregma 7y ago
    One word: palimpsest.
theamk 7y ago
On the other side, I have already lost all of the printed photos from 2000 (I moved houses a few times...) but I still have the digital files from that year. Same with audio recordings - I have lost the tapes, but mp3’s are still around. Sure, digital is requires a bit of effort, but redundancy is amazing. Every 5-10 years I move the files on the new medium, and it becomes easier and easier. I used to need a fragile, heavy HDD that cost hundreds of dollars - and now all I need a $30 MicroSD card. (And microsd cards are amazing.. I love the fact that they need no mechanical readers to get worn out, and that the protocol is so simple it can be implemented from scratch in a week with minimal documentation)
Thorrez 7y ago
GitHub is archiving all the repositories by etching them onto quartz glass with a femtosecond laser. It should last 10,000 years. https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/

We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.

by wbl 7y ago

We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.

At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago. Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Digital media evidence stark access problems even over the course of a few years or decades. We do have century-plus-old digital media archives -- the Hollerith card was invented for use on the 1880 US Census. Paper, punched-tape, mag-tape (I've held steel rolls, they're ... fairly massive), and numerous hard and floppy-drive formats have come ... and gone. The advantages of ink on paper (or chisled stone or stylused clay) is that the reading itself is unmediated. That is, once a person is trained in how to read symbols, a task we're reasonably competent at accomplishing by about age 12 for 95%+ of the population, if not earlier and more, the content itself is simply readable. Digital formats require decoding, dedicated readers, interfaces, power supplies, often device drivers and quite frequently data format decoding as well. This is a significant issue, with considerable resources dedicated to it: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov http://www.digitalpreservation.gov https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/preservation-issues https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/pres... https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserving-our-future-the-importance-of-digital-preservation https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserv... (This discussion occurs as I'm working on updating content on the Google+ exodus and access to, or lack, content stored (or not) in the Internet Archive from that now-defunct, but still providing HTTP-200 responses, website.)
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Correction: 1890 census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 Though antecedents existed dating to the 18th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
fourthark 7y ago
Or as long as the service you bought it from cares to support it. (Granted, Project Gutenberg is probably as immortal as you describe. Kindle less so.)
kwhitefoot 7y ago
And there probably will not be any hard drives in a thousand years from now. Books are not as flammable as all that and generally survive higher temperatures than magnetic disks can. And books are generally printed in thousands of copies so they are replicated and distributed too. They also don't suffer to the same extent from technological change. It is now rather difficult to find computers that have floppy disk drives for instance, parallel ATA is also not especially common either. In addition magnetic media is not as robust even at normal temperatures. So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable. In principle you might be right but it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results.
- falcolas 7y ago
  > it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results. Funny, that’s exactly the role monks used to play in keeping many of these afforementioned documents readable. And “less flammable” matters little when we’re talking about house or library fires, during which sufficient heat to make iron pliable can be easily achieved. The advantage of digital backups there is that the (well planned) backups don’t live in the same place as the original. And since we’re talking about Mass Market paperbacks, can we talk about how fragile those things are these days? Sure, one from 30+ years ago is in decent condition - probably better condition than a new one hot off the press. The glue they use anymore is terrible - having pages fall out during the first read is pretty commonplace anymore. I’d give better odds to a 30 year old paperback that’s lasted this long than a new book to make it another 30 years.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The reason monks played a role in the hand-transcribing (and error-inducing) manu scripts was because mechanical reproduction didn't exist. Estimates are that in all of Europe as of 1400 there were on the order of 40,000 titles or editions, and about 15 million volumes, total. A large library might have a few thousand volumes (University of Paris ~1200 CE: 2,000, the Vatican, ~1400, ~5,000). As of 1800, the British Museum (now the British Library) contained only 50,000 volumes. Individual books, scrolls, parchments, and cuneiform tablets (https://cdli.ucla.edu https://cdli.ucla.edu) can survive thousands of years. The larger problem for more recent woodpulp paper texts is one that's common to many digital storage media: poor chemical stability. Acid-treated paper will crumble to dust. Archival-grade cotton rag will last centuries or more. So long as you're talking flame and heat, you might care to check the ratings of your CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDD, and SDD media before feeling too secure. Quality of current-gen paper print media is indeed low. Hardcover, for a price, delivers markedly better durability. Keep in mind too that you're applying survivorship bias to your sampling of 30-year-old paperbacks -- the ones that wouldn't survive 30 years ... haven't. (I've numerous old books which are now in pretty sorry condition. And others which remain robust. Details matter.)
angrygoat 7y ago
Yes, but look what happened when we tried to digitise and preserve a 1000 year old book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
- neurobro 7y ago
  > They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public. > ... > It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms). Copyright is a huge impediment to the long-term preservation of digital cultural artifacts, mitigated by the people's willingness (and technical ability, for now) to ignore it.
  - Brave-Steak 7y ago
    Projects like this should be "hacked" and the data released into the wild. It's insane that we so willingly lock up vast amounts of culture and media behind copyright law which hasn't even been around in its current form for 100 years, yet its impact will be felt for centuries to come.
gambiting 7y ago
That only works if someone puts in the effort to actually keep copying this data. Personal anecdote time: I work for a large games developer, at a studio that has existed for 30 years now. Recently we've dug out some archived material for the very first games the studio worked on, and guess what? It's nearly all lost. 9/10 floppies don't read at all. As far as we can tell, the source code for those original games from 1990-1995 is completely lost because we can't read any of the source media. Even some later archives are useless, I have a full spindle of Kodak CD-R discs burnt in 1998 and literally none of them read, the underside has turned translucent, never seen that before. Some other brands(Sony, TDK) survived a lot better and most of those CDs still read, but if we left this work for another 10-20 years it would probably all be gone completely. And then guess what has survived absolutely fine? All design documents actually printed on paper. Actual drawings, notes, scribbles from designers - all of that we have and it's perfectly readable. But source code saved digitally is gone. It's a massive shame really.
- bluGill 7y ago
  You didn't print the documentation on a thermal printer? I have lost documentation because it was printed on thermo paper which degrades in months.
catalogia 7y ago
In a thousand years, how many of the hard drives dug up will be encrypted?

BurningFrog 7y ago

Those are some very rare exceptions, if we're going to take this argument seriously. Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.

wbl 7y ago
That is incorrect. The big loss was papyrus to vellum where the monks had to make hard choices. Anything written on vellum was expensive so carefully prserved: there weren't a lot of books.
- bregma 7y ago
  One word: palimpsest.

theamk 7y ago

On the other side, I have already lost all of the printed photos from 2000 (I moved houses a few times...) but I still have the digital files from that year. Same with audio recordings - I have lost the tapes, but mp3’s are still around. Sure, digital is requires a bit of effort, but redundancy is amazing. Every 5-10 years I move the files on the new medium, and it becomes easier and easier. I used to need a fragile, heavy HDD that cost hundreds of dollars - and now all I need a $30 MicroSD card. (And microsd cards are amazing.. I love the fact that they need no mechanical readers to get worn out, and that the protocol is so simple it can be implemented from scratch in a week with minimal documentation)

Thorrez 7y ago

GitHub is archiving all the repositories by etching them onto quartz glass with a femtosecond laser. It should last 10,000 years. https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/