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That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. We certainly know by now how to build a redundancy that will guaranty the data safety. For most of the libraries it
by ivanhoe 4y ago
That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. We certainly know by now how to build a redundancy that will guaranty the data safety. For most of the libraries it's really a budget problem - they've been given huge expensive buildings with controlled air conditions for storing paper books and that's sort of taken for granted, but then governments take cuts on providing them with proper IT infrastructure and knowledgeable staff for maintaining the digital data copies.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago> That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. the point is exactly that: if you have to rely on very complex setups to keep the data fresh, it means that the data is not safe. can you imagine an hard disk surviving from the ancient Egypt to us?
- ketzu 4y agoWasn't the point of the original comment that the setup to keep paper safe is also very complex? Another question I wonder about: How hard is noticing the failures?
- robinsonb5 4y agoThe cold hard truth here is that curating information is actually a very difficult problem - but paper records will survive longer than digital records if no-one's actively looking after them.
- ivanhoe 4y agoIt's 100% true for a book forgotten on your attic, but if discussing organized effort to preserve information I argue it's an illusion - the libraries have to be actively looked after too. There is a fire protection, regular deratization and disinsection, if roof starts leaking it has to be fixed. If you just leave a book in the middle of a field unprotected it won't last a year. When libraries are left without funds their books get destroyed fairly quickly, I've seen that first hand in my home country. Digital data requires some maintenance, but with cloud services that's offloaded to service providers. I haven't logged in into Glacier or the related AWS account in years, and yet it still backups my hdd regularly. Now, if a comet strikes the Earth and destroys all the civilization, yes, paper books will be a lot more useful than HDDs or dead cloud servers, but in more realistic scenarios data copies give you more flexibility. Just look at Ukraine, they moved all their official digital archives out of the country at the very beginning of the war. You couldn't ever pull it off with paper archives, it would take months and cost a fortune.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoyes, it's hard, but papyrus kept inside a very strong, possibly waterproof, possibly not affected by rust (alluminium, stainless steel etc), metal box will last much longer than hard drives kept inside the same strong metal box.
- moffkalast 4y agoBit rot: bonjour