this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
470 points (97.6% liked)

Technology

59148 readers
1946 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
470
Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
152 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (11 children)

That's why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you'd want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Please stop that, DNA is good for mutations, not for long-term consistency.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well I guess I'm picturing DNA encoding like a RAID billion in terms of redundancy, so with some checksumming, you ought be able to sort out any mutations? But I'm no geneticist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

There's also that pesky low r/w bitrate.

load more comments (8 replies)