Much of that loss is because there little or no effort to preserve it in first place. There is nothing inherently more fragile about digital data over physical, if anything it’s more robust. Digitiser data is perfectly reproducible, there can only ever be one “original” physical document.
But it does require making a proper effort at archiving it. If digital data is effectively duplicated, stored in properly documented formats and regularly maintained for integrity it can theoretically last forever. Gradual degradation and natural and manmade disasters will eventually consume all physical media.
That is still not an argument to *deliberately destroy” physical documents however. There are plenty of good reasons to try to keep them as long as possible, and continue to learn from them, even if their existence will still be finite.
troydowling@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah, it certainly can go that way unfortunately. I’m in favour of digitisation generally, but at a minimum it relies on:
I believe that, in general, things lost to time on the net violate one of those two rules. They either resided on a single privately held server which was discontinued, or the data was locked up in some proprietary file format which was inevitably replaced for the sake of selling the new software product.
The benefits of pulling this off correctly are enormous: