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"The Cloud" has radically changed this situation. Sure, it will always be possible to accidentally delete or corrupt something, and, yes, there are formats that
by cek 15y ago
"The Cloud" has radically changed this situation. Sure, it will always be possible to accidentally delete or corrupt something, and, yes, there are formats that will be unreadable in the future, but the fact that
- ingress to the cloud AND
- storage in the cloud
have costs rapidly approaching $zero mean that storing duplicate copies is already almost automatic.
I have a stack of 5.25" and 3.5" floppies with all my high-school & college papers and code on them. They may or may not be readable today. But EVERYTHING I have done in the last 15 or so years is on multiple hard disks both in my home and in the cloud. I did not have to work too hard to make that happen.
Today it's even more automatic. Dropbox, Amazon S3, Amazon Cloud Drive, Flickr, cloud based email, all mean just about everything I do/have digitally is preserved in a far more accessible and stable way than ever was previously possible.
- watmough 15y agoSure, whilst you're alive, your data is being preserved and transported to new ways to store it. But what about when it's your children and grandchildren? My father has most of my grandmother's personal effects and pictures. Can you bet that your grandchildren will be able to access and recognize your data, pictures and music. As an example, we've already seen one DRM protected storage system fail in the market, the ironically named 'PlayForSure', any guarantee that others will survive? What about archaic image formats? What about 40 years from now?
- cek 15y agoI don't understand your first point. My "upon my death" file provides credentials. Your second point is interesting but I think this discussion is about personal information and, at least as far as I can see, people don't DRM that.