Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day
kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours agoI 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.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I mean, this is really my point. This stuff isn’t going to be maintained forever and will eventually be lost - even if it takes 100 years or more. This idea of future archaeologists troweling their way through Facebook posts isn’t going to happen.
Even much of what we know about the first civilizations in Mesopotamia is only because their clay tablets - which were never intended to be permanent records of anything - were accidentally fired and buried when their storage facilities caught fire. It’s possible that some modern forms of media might be accidentally preserved and restored somehow thousands of years in the future, but it’s a bit hard to imagine such a scenario. Especially when we’re going to cook ourselves off the planet before then.
klu9@lemmy.ca 10 minutes ago
Most of the Chinese internet from the mid-90s to ~2010 has already disappeared.