Technology

I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable

This is important, and for some media, it should be more often than that.

People forget that flash memory uses electrical charge to store data. It's not durable. If left unpowered for too long, that data will get corrupted. A failure might not even be visible without examining every bit of every file.

Keep backups. Include recovery data (e.g. PAR2). Store them on multiple media. Keep them well-maintained (e.g. give flash drives power). Mind their environment. Copy them to new storage devices before the old ones become obsolete.

It's funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

This is where "piracy" is actually the industry's saving grace. Decades or centuries later, will record labels exist and be well-managed (and flush with cash) enough to preserve archival copies of their artists catalogs? Probably not.

Will obscure weirdos exist all around the world on Usenet, IRC, or seeding torrents? Possibly.

There is no "write and forget" solution. There never has been.

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts? No, we have only those that have been copied over and over in the course of the centuries. Historians knows too well. And 90% of anything ever written by humans in all history has been lost, all that was written on more durable media than ours.

The future will hold only those memories of us that our descendants will take the time to copy over and over. Nothing that we will do today to preserve our media will last 1000 years in any case.

(Will we as a specie survive 1000 more years?)

Still, it our duty to preserve for the future as much as we can. If today's historians are any guide, the most important bits will be those less valuable today: the ones nobody will care to actually preserve.

Citing Alessandro Barbero, a top notch Italian current historian, he would kill no know what a common passant had for breakfast in the tenth century. We know nothing about that, while we know a tiny little more about kings.

Yeah if you're looking for long term it needs to be archival media. Many people think the flash drive will hold it forever but they are potentially the most fickle.

Im really hoping, waiting, for a good dense long-term storage medium. It doesn't have to be fast, but large, cheap, and durable. I want a way to backup my plex library, or even, daily backups of documents and project files, and I don't want to think about them ever again.

To me, this is just another story of the music industry's technical incompetence.

Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your "archival solution" had issues.

It's not a bad start though, and how hard would it be for the people who have surviving copies to copy it to "the next best new thing" in 10 years? The problem is of course that sequence would need to be continued on, like a tradition, which is doable as well.

how music is so complicated to archive now

??

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?

Well, nothing lasts forever. I'd say distributing them on something that lasts 10+ years is better than doing noting. Otherwise they just get lost, buried in the attic or the next harddrive crash takes them.

I got four HDDs, some are almost 10 years old. They work great but I know that won't be for forever.

In my life I've had several HDD's and SSD's fail on me. None of that shit lasts forever and you would honestly be surprised how often they fail. For huge servers like data centers the average failure rate is between 1% and 2% per year, and sometimes even higher. They literally have to replace hard drives on a daily basis because of failure.

Disk failure is one of the reasons I have copies of all of my important stuff saved to every hard drive on my computer, along with an external just in case. One time my system drive failed and I couldn't save anything because my operating system stopped working. Had to reinstall the OS and do a data recovery. Ended up with a bunch of photos that were corrupted, distorted, or missing half the photo.

Buy Spinrite. It's not perfect but it's the best thing available for drive maintenance and recovery. I have used it for over 10 years. If the drive is dying it'll take forever, but I've recovered data that was nearly gone due to sector loss. It goes down to the bit level BTW. Someday Steve will release v7 .. someday.

These people haven't heard of zfs then?

My system is to duplicate to fresh media once in a while. It's more hands on, but it's the only option I have. My NAS will be cloned to new drives in the next few years.