Technology

58123 readers

4130 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

470

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

submitted 6 days ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

153 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] curry@programming.dev 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Problem is how to read the disk, especially after generations. Will they retain the knowledge to build and operate a device for this?

[–] endofline@lemmy.ca 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] thawed_caveman@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Simple, we wrrie down the information on how to read the discs!

[–] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of "Last Words (2020)".

[–] Hamartia@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

Microfilms used to be sold as having a life expectancy of up 500 years. But in my experience they were a pain to use and the machines costly to maintain. The films would tear regularly too. Also the quality of the recorded image could be very poor sometimes.