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In 100 years with minimal, passive effort, a piece of paper will be fragile, but usable. In 100 years, a hard drive will degrade without multiple transfers to

In 100 years with minimal, passive effort, a piece of paper will be fragile, but usable. In 100 years, a hard drive will degrade without multiple transfers to new media - an active process. The barrier to digital archival is much higher than paper archival for the average person, and the internet does forget. There's not really an equivalent authority who preserves records for digital works, is there? The Internet Archive works toward this goal, but their mission is not enshrined anywhere permanent and could be gutted.

geodel 3y ago
Yes. The amount of digital data will be like, I don't know, 10 order of magnitude more than paper content. So I think archiving even 0.00001% for long term maybe tall order.
lorax 3y ago
In 100 years most paper will be gone, thrown out, without any attempt to archive it. In 100 years most digital will be gone for the same reason. The exceptions in both cases is where something is “fortuitously forgotten”, a box left in an attic after a move, or a web page that remains in a fossilized state. Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't been born yet) that the records should be saved. That's the hard part. Disaster recovery for millions of paper records is hard. So hard that even the US Government, which has been archiving paper records since its inception, sometimes fails. The majority of the 1890 census records were lost to a fire as well as a chunk of military service records (to a different fire). Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.
- growingkittens 3y ago
  > Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade. Who is this "someone", though? There's no long term, passive, digital storage solution available for the average person. Records that used to survive on a regular basis no longer do so in digital form.

geodel 3y ago

Yes. The amount of digital data will be like, I don't know, 10 order of magnitude more than paper content. So I think archiving even 0.00001% for long term maybe tall order.

lorax 3y ago

In 100 years most paper will be gone, thrown out, without any attempt to archive it. In 100 years most digital will be gone for the same reason. The exceptions in both cases is where something is “fortuitously forgotten”, a box left in an attic after a move, or a web page that remains in a fossilized state. Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't been born yet) that the records should be saved. That's the hard part. Disaster recovery for millions of paper records is hard. So hard that even the US Government, which has been archiving paper records since its inception, sometimes fails. The majority of the 1890 census records were lost to a fire as well as a chunk of military service records (to a different fire). Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.

growingkittens 3y ago
> Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade. Who is this "someone", though? There's no long term, passive, digital storage solution available for the average person. Records that used to survive on a regular basis no longer do so in digital form.