Even some articles or blogposts are without publish date. This should be illegal.
Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day
jsomae@lemmy.ml 23 hours ago
In the distant future, when we look back on scattered social media caps, we will regret that the date of posting is not shown.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
The fun thing is that none of this stuff is going to survive long-term at all. Databases are backed up onto forms of media that have a very short lifespan. Only material that is endlessly copied forward (like DNA) will still be around, and nobody is going to pay for that kind of archiving. FWIW this fact make me happy.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 11 hours ago
As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
If you want reliable media to last on a timeline relevant to our lives and even several generations, look into M disc blurays. Though, similar to dual layer dvds back in the day, it’s much easier to find a writer than the media itself. But it claims lifespans of centuries to millennia rather than decades usually associated with other disc media. They are actually etched instead of just using some fancy ink. Readable by normal drives, too. It’s just on the writing side that you need one that can specifically handle M discs. It also supports multi-layers, but those are even harder to find and get pretty pricey.
Still not likely a way to pass information ahead to civilizations even tens of thousands of years away, and even before they break down, a new civilization would need to figure out how to read and interpret them (when we had trouble reading hieroglyphs from known civilizations that we could read directly with our eyes).
But at least they should be relatively safe to write, verify, then forget about for a few decades until you find them and want to take a walk down memory lane. Assuming you can still get a bluray reader at that point, or held on to one. Pack them together and future you or your heirs might be grateful.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
I randomly download scattered memes that I will want to repost endlessly in the future. I assume other people do the same.
kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.
But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Things like tape drives and optical storage etc. Even if they have lifespans measured in decades (and these things typically don’t) that still means they have short life spans in terms of being recoverable in the future. A hundred years from now these things won’t be restorable.
kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn’t even know optical was used professionally, and found the term “optical jukebox” to be hilarious :)
nist.gov/…/digital-evidence-preservation-consider…
But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.
*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn’t particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.