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Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them. I suspect that many peo
by II2II 3y ago
Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them.
I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we associate the failure of a flash drive with a cheap drive rather than the intrinsic properties of the media, or we attribute it to abuse. We rarely have the opportunity to use something until it is worn out, or pick it up after a quarter century in storage.
Modern media is incredibly fragile. The chief advantage it has (in terms of longevity) is its digital nature, in our ability to reproduce it exactly. Yet that is only an advantage if we actively maintain our archives.
- yomlica8 3y agoOne unexpected issue with digital media is changing manufacturing quality and an inability to identify it until it is to late. Early stage floppy disks and CDs actually were pretty reliable but by the tail end so much cost saving had happened in manufacturing they'd turned to crap. The same thing has happened with flash drives already, how do you identify a good flash drive? If you aren't careful you'll end up with a counterfeit but even the genuine articles have shaky reputations and manufacturers change the internal parts all the time.
- II2II 3y agoI definitely agree with the difficulty in identifying reliable products, and it is made even more difficult due to marketing (e.g. conflating the "quality materials" of the shell with the overall reliability of the product). That said, such things did happen in the past. Paper is the classic example since the manufacturing process affected its longevity, yet many other materials are graded based upon their properties.
- neuralRiot 3y ago> I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. Or probably because paper or other media has already stood the trial of time, there are some papyrus dating around 2500BC that’s more than 4000 years ago, now think if any of the tools needed for current media will be available 4000 years from now.