'Digital Dark Age May Doom Some Data'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Nov 2008 09:13 UTC, submitted by irbis
In the News What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer's hard drive? The concern for archivists and information scientists is that, with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility.
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RE: 50 years from now? Try 15!
by hobgoblin on Mon 10th Nov 2008 16:10 UTC in reply to "50 years from now? Try 15!"
hobgoblin
Member since:
2005-07-06

yep, i would love to see a hardrive or ssd consist of a collection of smaller parts that one could disassemble and replace without the need for a clean room and identical parts.

thats why im of two minds when it comes to using hardrives as archive media.

they eat up a whole lot of data if they die, and there is basically no chance of recovery save for a expensive specialist company.

with optical media there is more limited space, but you have the reader and the media itself separated, so if the reader dies you can just replace that without risk to the media itself.

and being as cheap as it is, having two copies of optical media is less of a problem then having two copies of a hardrive.

Reply Parent Score: 1

Glynser Member since:
2007-11-29

[quote]and being as cheap as it is, having two copies of optical media is less of a problem then having two copies of a hardrive.[/quote]

Yeah, but it's also a difference if you only need 2x 1 TB of hard drive space, or if you need a few hundred CDs / DVDs ;)

So in that case, I'd rather buy two 1 TB drives to save all my stuff twice instead of burning it to lots and lots of CDs which all last for a few years and then have to be copied again.

Reply Parent Score: 1

hobgoblin Member since:
2005-07-06

imo, time to triage the data then. find out what one really care about and whats "junk" (program related files and so on).

if one where to store that amount of data as physical paper, one would be running out of living space quickly.

but as one can just slap it all onto a device the size of a large book, and stuff it in the back of the closet, one no longer consider the value or waste of it.

Reply Parent Score: 2