Technology

60033 readers

2951 users here now

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

Our Rules

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

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

470

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months 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] 3 points 3 months ago

But we do have originals of many other texts. Like vast, vast amounts of cuneiform texts because they were usually pressed into a clay tablet and then baked.

All but four Mayan paper codices were burned, but the Mayans loved carving their stories into rocks and making those rocks part of their cities' architecture, so we still have a lot of their textual information. Same with the Egyptians- they wrote a lot on papyrus, and most of that is lost, but they also carved and painted all over tombs.

The secret is not to keep copying the texts. That introduces errors and those errors can compound. The secret is to preserve the texts in a medium which will only degrade over exceptionally long periods of time (compared to a human life, anyway).

If you had a device which could carve stored data into stone and make it retrievable again, you could potentially preserve that data for thousands of years.