4 ms·
The trick with digital data (including that stored in cloud services) is to keep it in motion. Movement from one service to another, leaving behind a copy that
by evgen 12y ago
The trick with digital data (including that stored in cloud services) is to keep it in motion. Movement from one service to another, leaving behind a copy that may eventually get deleted but just might stick around a while, is the best way to keep data available. Whatever disappeared with rapidshare would have been just fine if people have moved it to the various "latest and greatest" systems when they popped up, the only way it gets lost is if it stops moving.
- pmontra 12y agoWhat happens when one dies, who keeps moving that data? Companies eventually close. Millennia old documents made their way to us without anybody carying about them. Digital data seem to be intrinsically different from analog ones in that continuous care is needed. What you propose is a solution but I can't see who's going to do it for free as walls and caves did for paintings and inscriptions.
- agumonkey 12y agoNot necessarily. Analog data decays too. The issue is to be blind to the fact that neither `technology` is timeless and perfect. People are giving in too easy and too deep in digital data nowadays.
- jarek 12y ago> Analog data decays too. Sure but at what rate? Most 20 year old CDs are still fine, to say nothing of paper stored with a sliver of care, what percentage of web companies from 1995 are still around?
- evgen 12y agoConsider this fact, for perhaps a hundred years prior to digital technology consuming just about everything we collectively produced gigatons of paper output. How much of that is available today? A thousandth of a percent perhaps? Almost all of it has been lost and most of what does remain is available because it was related to someone famous or some famous event, or because it was widely replicated. Digital data is easy to replicate and spread widely. Given how cheap it is to store and how it gets cheaper every day it is not inconceivable that every bit that is generated and "donated to the public" will survive forever.
- agumonkey 12y agoNot so fast. If you abandon your house anything in it will be trashed in 20 years. Humidity, fungus, animals, whatever. Data you mention has been wiped or the medium has been destroyed. I have some old Seagate 6GB IDE hard drives that are still working properly. So maybe web companies data could have been around if their hdd had been stored in a nice location.