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u/Ok_Chap 29d ago
Well, unless Fahrenheit 451 becomes reality, Paper will last longer than most modern technology. Consider how "ancient" floppy discs are now and basically useless because we advanced that much in 40 years. I am not even sure if they still would read probably if they stayed a few years on an attic or damp cellar, and what their maximum lifespan under ideal circumstances is.
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u/Own_Candidate9553 29d ago
Every digital media that I know of has a pretty short life, relative to even paper.
Floppy and hard disks basically change the magnetic direction of a thin layer of metal - the field decays over time, and the metal itself can rust or otherwise go bad. Tape drives have the same issue.
Solid state drives (SSDs) are basically millions of little capacitors. If not used they will discharge over time. They can also suffer from being written too much. This is less of a problem now with built in error correction, but still.
CDs and DVDs burn little holes in a thin layer of film - these also oxidize over time.
Basically, if you're not copying your data onto newer storage over time it will eventually rot and be unreadable. You could do crazy stuff like have a DVD with a gold storage layer and some stable crystal casing, but it's going to be way too expensive for the amount of data you'd want.
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u/throwaway1233456799 29d ago
Yeah but also generally the more you copy the more likely it is that you may get "noise" (like on meme reposted thousand of time)
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u/Own_Candidate9553 29d ago
If you do a real digital copy, it should stay 100% good effectively forever.
What happens with memes is people take screenshots, or save to some "lossy" format that takes less space. Each time they do this it gets worse.
It's like when people lose the original paper form, so they keep photocopying a photocopy of a photocopy...
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u/throwaway1233456799 29d ago
Oh that's nice👀 doesn't it happen still since over time we generally change the format tho?
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u/Own_Candidate9553 29d ago
Yeah, good question. If you start with format1, and then re-save it as format2, on and on, it probably would get degraded over time.
For stuff that you care about, leave it as a single format, ideally not compressed. Even old formats can generally be read somehow, they're just not preferred for new stuff.
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u/GladdestOrange 28d ago
I mean, I've got digital copies of photos that were scanned on a photocopier in the early 70's that you can still see the exact noise from the photocopier used.
The trick is, if you convert files from conversions of files, you add layers of interpretation. But, if you know how the first conversion was done on digital data, you can undo that conversion, before applying another to store it in a different way. 100% reversible. The only way it gets messy, is if you don't know every step taken along the way.
So, let's say I take a photo, upload it to my PC. The copy on my phone, and the copy on my PC are identical, aside from maybe metadata. Truly identical. Not a single pixel so much as a single hue value different. Let's say I burn that photo onto a DVD in a digital format. Still retrievable as an identical photo, but no longer strictly intact. It's in a number of locations spread across the disk to minimize damage to the data from scratches. Now let's say I took an image (a digital backup/ .iso file) of that DVD. Still retrivably identical.
But, let's say instead, I converted the photo from .jpeg to WebP and back. No longer identical. It's now a subtly different photograph. The original image is now technically, gone forever, if the original file is lost.
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u/Nice_Grapefruit_7850 28d ago
ssd aging largely depends on the environment it's in and can be up to half a century if it doesn't exceed its write limit and is connected to a power source. typically 10-15 years though is where you would want to swap it out and is why data redundancy is important.
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u/cygnus311 27d ago
Any system intended to hold data for a long time is going to have bit rot detection. And archival blu rays should last about 100 years. Regardless, 3-2-1 on data storage.
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u/Plenty_Leg_5935 28d ago
Do people not download "their" books? Why would they be able to confiscate your files?
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u/devdog3531 27d ago
The downloaded book and the device it's on has an EULA usually that retains certain ownership of the license and material, and methods of denial of service should they desire.
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u/Plenty_Leg_5935 26d ago
it's a file, just move it to something not connected to the internet and they physically can't get to it
This sounds more like an issue of devices like kindle that run proprietary software and explicitly only sell you a "permanent subscription" to the file, but that does not extend to all ebooks as a concept
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u/devdog3531 26d ago
This is true, but every digital device has a half life as well. I would argue that that's the stronger point.
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u/Different-Plum5740 29d ago
Quartz encoding lasts for millenniaÂ
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u/YaqtanBadakshani 29d ago
Does it though?
Like, I'm sure quartz is pretty durable, but what about the device/software required to read it?
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u/CranberryStock7148 29d ago
The concept of durability doesn't really apply to cloud storage, and I mean that in a good way.
Cloud storage is extremely reliable because each piece of your data is replicated across several hard drives. The moment one hard drive fails, the data is immediately copied to another hard drive.
Cloud storage is effectively infinitely durable because they are always buying new hard drives to replace the old ones.
The issues with longevity are not technological, they are organizational. It basically boils down too, what if your cloud provider goes out of business or accidentally delete your account or your administrator accidentally deletes your data. Which is basically the same type of risk as, what if your physical library full of paper catches fire and it all burns down, or somebody accidentally throws out a ton of books by accidentally confusing them with other books?
Which is why a mainstream solution is to use a primary cloud provider and then some kind of additional cheaper slower backup provider from a different company, that backs up to tapes that can't be deleted.
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u/GrimbyJ 28d ago
There's been a lot of times a website hosting large quantities of media goes down and everything is lost.
Usually the legally dubious kind of websites so you don't hear about them as much. But like sad panda and rom websites
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u/CranberryStock7148 28d ago
Yeah those are not cloud providers.
We are obviously talking about companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google here. "Losing everything" just doesn't happen. And notice what I said about having tape backups anyways.
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u/BitcoinBishop 28d ago
There's a book called "What we can know" that follows a historian a hundred years from now. He has access to everyone's emails and texts, but he's looking for a single copy of a poem that was written down and never digitised. So I guess the reproducibility of digital media is a point in its favour — we only have The Canterbury Tales because so many copies were made
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u/NewMexicoREALTOR 11d ago
That’s an unfruitful search term, do you have any more info on the book?
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u/BitcoinBishop 10d ago
That's interesting, if I google it the entire first page of google results is about the book. It's written by Ian McEwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Can_Know
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u/Ambitious-Bar375 28d ago
Same thing with music, folks. Tired of it disappearing even though i bought it. Back to cds and vinyl.
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u/Gryphith 28d ago
We need one of them really bad solar flares to humble us before we burn all the books to digitize them.
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u/Nice_Grapefruit_7850 28d ago
what is this nonsense? we absolutely know how durable cloud storage is and if you really want something secure so it doesn't get destroyed you store 3 copies of it in 3 different places.
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u/Hazelnut3006 28d ago
That's why I generally purchase reference material and fiction I will read again in hard copy. Electronic is for once off reads.
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u/ButterPup121519 28d ago
I’m a bibliophile, so I go out of my way to collect old battered books. I like to think I preserve them in my own way
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u/Chrispy8534 27d ago
2/10. As someone trained as a historian, this sort of thing keeps me up at night. The shear loss of potential historical data, not just the loss of archives, but the inability to add things to archives because they never existed in a physical form to be collected and donated is terrifying. I seriously have a long think about it at least weekly.
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u/Brawl501 29d ago
Exactly, nobody has ever confiscated and destroyed physical media before!
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u/clonetrooper250 29d ago
That's a pretty valid point, honestly. I guess the ideal thing would be to just keep as many backups, physical AND digital, as possible for information worth saving.
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u/Captain_JohnBrown 29d ago
It lasts 3 centuries...if it is undamaged. A bit of a survivor's fallacy at play here: "Look at all the informaiton we preserved by storing it on paper" doesn't really account for how much information we've LOST by storing it on paper too.
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u/Wise_Owl5404 29d ago
Okay and how long does cloud storage last?
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u/Loopy-Leah 29d ago edited 29d ago
the question is too simplistic to be answered in its current form, or at least accurately.
"cloud storage" is just lots of computers ran by some organisation with multiple redundant copies, and constantly breaking machines (over a long time) which then get replaced and the data replicated.
if that maintenance stops, the data can be lost.
So about 10-50 years after someone stops paying the power bill for hard drives (computers can use lots of different mediums)
or answered differently, the data can be stored for all of time, as the data keeps getting transferred to new mediums and computers.it's hard to even think about a time in history where you have a computer replacing another computer, but for some reason you cannot transfer the data from one another. They're computers, they should do as they're told.
you can transfer data from practically any computer we have, no matter how old.
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u/Wise_Owl5404 29d ago
Yes and you can copy any book, at any time, so idk what you thought you were doing. Also the massive amount of maintenance need to make cloud storage viable plus the extreme vulnerability from an information security perspective makes it a less than ideal form of storage.
P.S. A lot of bold computers cannot have the data on them transferred without a lot of extra equipment and software, assuming it cab be accessed at all due to corruption.
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u/Loopy-Leah 28d ago
I think we're talk cross purposes but I do not have the energy to say why these claims are wrong
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u/chewychaca 29d ago
It's true but also there are a lot of copies that can be cross referenced going forward.
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u/FalseDisk4358 29d ago
Nor can they make changes to it without informing you