3 ms·

Now we really need a long term storage medium. Has anybody else though about just how fragile data is these days I mean these books/manuscripts are ancient? W

by Fuxy 13y ago

Now we really need a long term storage medium. Has anybody else though about just how fragile data is these days I mean these books/manuscripts are ancient? What is the likelihood of any of our data surviving for over 1000 years in the digital realm? We need a long therm digital data archive or we risk loosing a lot of important but not very popular data since the internet favors popularity over importance.

ekianjo 13y ago
Problem is, data storage evolves very fast and new technologies come and go. Even if you designed the ultimate, 1000-year durable floppy disk 20 years back, nobody would use it now because it's obsolete in terms of storage. You can only reach this kind of thinking when storage density reaches a plateau. Personally, rather than data storage, i'm much more concerned about the formats and the OS we use for our files - will they still be supported 50-100 years down the road ? For the ones which are open-sourced, maybe, but how about all the proprietary formats ? How can we ensure they will remain readable ?
- nodata 13y ago
  You store the data in an open lossless format at the highest quality that makes sense, then transfer the digital copy from storage medium to storage medium as they are developed. So for your example you'd transfer from floppy disk to bluray.
  - Fuxy 13y ago
    Regular storage mediums are just too fragile and if you have a lot of data transferring it over takes too long we're still digitizing books. Long term storage medium capacity doesn't need to progress in line with regular storage mediums it just need to be updated once it's too out of sync. The old data can stay on the old version since there's no urgency in transferring it over as long as the spec for it is kept on the latest medium a reader can always be built to read it. We tend to worry about not having devices to read it but given how 3D printers are progressing having the spec and building a replacement reader should be easy enough.
Cthulhu_ 13y ago
There's a few techniques out there or being developed for this kind of data - things like disks made out of sapphire that last 10 million years, which are used to store information about nuclear waste storage (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132793-the-10-million-year-sapphire-hard-disk http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132793-the-10-million-yea...).

by Fuxy 13y ago

ekianjo 13y ago

Problem is, data storage evolves very fast and new technologies come and go. Even if you designed the ultimate, 1000-year durable floppy disk 20 years back, nobody would use it now because it's obsolete in terms of storage. You can only reach this kind of thinking when storage density reaches a plateau. Personally, rather than data storage, i'm much more concerned about the formats and the OS we use for our files - will they still be supported 50-100 years down the road ? For the ones which are open-sourced, maybe, but how about all the proprietary formats ? How can we ensure they will remain readable ?

nodata 13y ago
You store the data in an open lossless format at the highest quality that makes sense, then transfer the digital copy from storage medium to storage medium as they are developed. So for your example you'd transfer from floppy disk to bluray.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  Regular storage mediums are just too fragile and if you have a lot of data transferring it over takes too long we're still digitizing books. Long term storage medium capacity doesn't need to progress in line with regular storage mediums it just need to be updated once it's too out of sync. The old data can stay on the old version since there's no urgency in transferring it over as long as the spec for it is kept on the latest medium a reader can always be built to read it. We tend to worry about not having devices to read it but given how 3D printers are progressing having the spec and building a replacement reader should be easy enough.

Cthulhu_ 13y ago

There's a few techniques out there or being developed for this kind of data - things like disks made out of sapphire that last 10 million years, which are used to store information about nuclear waste storage (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132793-the-10-million-year-sapphire-hard-disk http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132793-the-10-million-yea...).