4 ms·
Print media is often considered 'more permanent' that other digital storage media. But consider: every courthouse I ever visited had records 'back to the fire',
by JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Print media is often considered 'more permanent' that other digital storage media. But consider: every courthouse I ever visited had records 'back to the fire', the time the records room burned. Every one.
Considering the flammability of paper multiplied by the probability of a fire annually gives you the means to come up with a mean-time-between-failure for paper records. And I'd guess it isn't very long - maybe 50 years to a century.
- xattt 4y agoSprinklers, as well as waterless fire suppression systems, are fairly recent inventions so their mettle has not been really tested on the time scale of document archiving.
- bluGill 4y agoUnless you have ideal storage conditions, print media won't last more than a few hundred years - and that is with acid free paper, acid treated paper won't last that long. There is a reason ancient documents are found in Egypt "all the time" and almost no place else in the world: Egypt is an ideal climate to store paper. The rest of the world paper will decay in a few hundred years. (of course modern technology can create better conditions - if we choose to keep it running)