> How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? The idea is to act as a repeater, or like dynamically refreshed RAM, de

> How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? The idea is to act as a repeater, or like dynamically refreshed RAM, detecting and amplifying the signal at each copy before it degrades too far. You still have the error rate of reading and writing each time, but it's often cheaper to get the same error rate by refreshing cheap media than by using a more permanent medium. Interleaved error correction (such as on a CD) kind of works as you describe, spreading out the error from a single physical point across the logical data so that it can be corrected by intact data elsewhere. This works because it's designed to recover from burst errors, corresponding to a localized scratch across the track. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%9...