Comment on Is the combined knowledge of humanity safer than it has ever been?

Chainweasel@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

No,
The best non-archival grade digital storage media will last decades at best, including optical Media like CD/DVD formats.
We’re in what’s considered a “digital dark age” where most of our digital backups will not survive in their current form and endless copying will eventually corrupt the data. There are archival grade systems that can theoretically store data for hundreds of years, but obviously we haven’t had a chance to test that yet.
But I think the biggest issue is compatibility.
If I were to hand you a 5¼ floppy disc with data on it, what’s the likelihood you have the equipment on hand to read that data right now? It’s pretty slim but it’s possible. But they’re not making 5¼ drives anymore and we’re left with what’s on hand.
200 years in the future, if someone finds an archival grade DVD long after the standard has been replaced, it’s highly unlikely they’ll have the equipment or software to read it.
The second issue is electricity.
If something like a Carrington event level solar flare happens and knocks us back to the Stone age for a generation or so, we’ll be able to read our remaining knowledge from ink and paper just fine, but we won’t have a prayer of accessing the digital information.
You need to remember that digital storage is less than a century old, we’re just scratching the surface of this tech now and we haven’t even come close to revealing all of its secrets, things are going to continue changing rapidly for the foreseeable future and a consequence of that is leaving old tech behind.

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