5 ms·
Pretty much. You see hobbyists getting data off of 30+ year old hard drives for the novelty of it, but I can’t imagine relying on that as a preservation copy. O
by abracadaniel 2y ago
Pretty much. You see hobbyists getting data off of 30+ year old hard drives for the novelty of it, but I can’t imagine relying on that as a preservation copy. Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc. Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.
- animal531 2y agoSometimes they fail for other reasons as well, such as improper storage. Back in the 90's to 00's a friend had a collection of cd's that he'd written, but he stored them in a big sleeved folder container. The container itself caused them to warp slightly, which made them unusable. I took a few for testing and managed to unbend them after some time, which turned them back into a working state. [Note: That's the most apostrophes I've ever used in a sentence, it feels dirty]
- aimor 2y agoA little dirty according to CMOS. Ought to be '90s not 90's, cds not cd's. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch09/psec035.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch09/ps... https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0051.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/P...
- animal531 2y agoThanks for the tip!
- Hydrocarb0n 2y agoCan you share your unbending method, I have a collection in the same state, did you use weight or heat or a combination of?
- animal531 2y agoYeah I didn't want to use heat in case that did more damage, so I just used some weights I had lying around. If I remember right I just stacked a few starting on the floor with a protective layer in-between so as to not scratch them (a piece of paper is fine). Then add a 5kg or whatever weight on top. After a few days I turned them over and did the same again. After that most were flat, only one or two needed some more individual time. I imagine that if after that if they're still not flat them maybe heating them slightly in the oven or even just the sun outside might do the trick.
- NikkiA 2y agoPaper remains the most effective long term storage.
- elzbardico 2y agoergo, my suggestion of archiving stuff in punch cards.
- NikkiA 2y ago1 line of 80col text per card is pretty awful though, and then you bring back all the horrors of 60s card sequencing but for bigger files. Some kind of 'barcode' encoding, with heavy error correction, would probably be better. I've seen attempts that claim 500kB per side using a largely unmodified QR code system, but I suspect better could be achieved - the method of scanning is probably going to be the bottleneck anyway.
- master_crab 2y agoDepends on the paper. Stone tablets, on the other hand, are rock solid. (Pun intended)
- larshaendler 2y agoI have been working in long term storage for many years. I never understood why we cant just 3d-print binary code on thin clay tablets and then burn them for long term storage. Clay tablets are readable for thousands of years.
- NikkiA 2y agoStone - and more usefully, clay - last almost forever, but they're impractical for digital storage, since there's no useful way of imprinting on them that isn't very low density, unlike paper. Unless we could improvise something with old-school dot matrix impact heads to print on clay - I wonder if anyone has tried.