The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson.

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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    2 months ago

    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.