My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
There is no “write and forget” solution. There never has been.
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts? No, we have only those that have been copied over and over in the course of the centuries. Historians knows too well. And 90% of anything ever written by humans in all history has been lost, all that was written on more durable media than ours.
The future will hold only those memories of us that our descendants will take the time to copy over and over. Nothing that we will do today to preserve our media will last 1000 years in any case.
(Will we as a specie survive 1000 more years?)
Still, it our duty to preserve for the future as much as we can. If today’s historians are any guide, the most important bits will be those less valuable today: the ones nobody will care to actually preserve.
Citing Alessandro Barbero, a top notch Italian current historian, he would kill no know what a common passant had for breakfast in the tenth century. We know nothing about that, while we know a tiny little more about kings.
In some cases we do. For example, the documents at Pompeii, those at Qumran, and other rare instances where documents have been preserved from the time they’re written. It’s also true that we have far more copies than originals, and that we’ve lost most of the works of many ancient authors.
There is: mdiscs. Allegedly 1000 years durability even in Blu-ray format. Should be good enough for most important things. The best tapes AFAIK 30- 100 years
Problem is how to read the disk, especially after generations. Will they retain the knowledge to build and operate a device for this?
Simple, we wrrie down the information on how to read the discs!
That’s always problem for any type of media. Including the tape which keep changing generations and only few recent are supported for reading. I still have blue ray reader / writer though
It’s even the case for physical media, like paper and carved stone, because over a long enough time people forget the language that they were written in. Historians had to teach themselves how to read ancient egyptian, and off the top i think a lot of Maya inscriptions are still a mystery.
We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We’d probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn’t been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There’s a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That’s why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.
(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn’t have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)
New record format just dropped.
Updoot just for this
But we do have originals of many other texts. Like vast, vast amounts of cuneiform texts because they were usually pressed into a clay tablet and then baked.
All but four Mayan paper codices were burned, but the Mayans loved carving their stories into rocks and making those rocks part of their cities’ architecture, so we still have a lot of their textual information. Same with the Egyptians- they wrote a lot on papyrus, and most of that is lost, but they also carved and painted all over tombs.
The secret is not to keep copying the texts. That introduces errors and those errors can compound. The secret is to preserve the texts in a medium which will only degrade over exceptionally long periods of time (compared to a human life, anyway).
If you had a device which could carve stored data into stone and make it retrievable again, you could potentially preserve that data for thousands of years.
Sad little human. I have written my treatises into the warp and weft of reality itself. I have twisted my curiosity into the folds of your DNA and stamped my waxing madness into the ragged edges of the telomeres that mark your days as numbered. I have made of the stars a celestial QR code that burns across the skies of every planet, that burns across the eyes of every ape who stares into the night and asks “why?”. I announced The Work with a bang of gas and light and awe and set time itself into motion so my scripture could expand eternally into the infinite, benighted expanse.
Is this from something?