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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Problem is how to read the disk, especially after generations. Will they retain the knowledge to build and operate a device for this?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's always problem for any type of media. Including the tape which keep changing generations and only few recent are supported for reading. I still have blue ray reader / writer though

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

It's even the case for physical media, like paper and carved stone, because over a long enough time people forget the language that they were written in. Historians had to teach themselves how to read ancient egyptian, and off the top i think a lot of Maya inscriptions are still a mystery.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Simple, we wrrie down the information on how to read the discs!

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

I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of "Last Words (2020)".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Microfilms used to be sold as having a life expectancy of up 500 years. But in my experience they were a pain to use and the machines costly to maintain. The films would tear regularly too. Also the quality of the recorded image could be very poor sometimes.