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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] Shimitar@feddit.it 71 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (18 children)

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.

[–] Unbecredible@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is this from something?

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Sounds like an HFY prompt

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