Long-Term Data Preservation

With fewer and fewer printed works, I wonder how future archeologists will discover human knowledge from our era. Especially after a world-wide catastrophe. Human language written in the physical world seems more durable long-term than the electrons in a flash drive.

People have been talking about this problem for decades. The only information from this era likely to survive is what's stored in plain text or other easy to interpret format. Do you really think people 500 years from now will be able to watch the Blu-ray of Paul Blart Mall Cop 2? It's more likely that they'll be able to create a C compiler and build some of the free software of today.

7000 years in the future our greatest inventions will be gone without a single trace. Steel corrodes, our buildings crumble and nobody will be able to read the data on our HDD or SSDs. This well only survived because of special circumstances. Can we perhaps create a preservative environment that will keep our own history accessible 7000 years in the future?

I think the preservation is a huge, if somewhat unrelated issue. To recreate the text of one of these books people in the future will have to emulate the environment the book exists on. In some sort of apolcalyptic future that destroys the linear progression of our technological innovation (and the ability to access old content with our new technologies as they appear) everything will be lost. The learning curve for/possibility of some future society having some rosetta stone moment that allows

I've been thinking about this too, but I believe that Vint Cerf's solution is not feasible. Or, rather, it's a typical technologist "solution" that only prolongs the problem.Imagine you're an archaeologist in the year 4500 or so, by our calendar. What we know of as modern Western civilization collapsed thousands of years prior, all you have are physical artifacts dug out of the ground in your attempt to reconstruct the history of this lost civilization. What woul

Indeed history is gradual, but the thing that shocks me about this is that in 3,000 years when our successors look back, is this the period they're going to think our society ended?Is their society going to be digging through the buried remains of silicon valley and saying "their civilization seemed to disappear when they started mass producing these 3.5" and 2.5" boxes containing sheets of metal.It seems far fetched, but when all our data is digital, how long before we have a "burning of

The most interesting part of the story:But we know almost nothing about their daily lives, in part because most of their writing was recorded on perishable objects like cloth or wax tablets.Fast Forward 2800 years. What of our Dropbox files, helium filled hard drives, USB thumb drives, DVD-R discs, LTO tapes, etc will survive? Nothing. Because who will be copying all those bits every 5 years into the next latest trend in storage? Nobody.So all of the insights recorded in the anci

Hopefully never? If there are archeologists in a few thousands years, books will be a lot more useful than remains of harddrives

I often think about what digital information from the current time humans will still be able to access in 1000 years. Everyone's talking about IP law but I think future historians will be thankful for projects like this that aim to democratize knowledge and preserve it for the future

That presumes humans can access our (electronic) media and understand it, in some 8.000 years or further.There's no saying that there'll be a society capable of reading bits and bytes by then. Not just collapsed society -they'll hardly be interested in reading a random discussion on an orange forum for a niche group that lived 8000 years ago- but maybe even societies that are vastly technical superior to our own but cannot fathom what things meant 8 millenia back. I mean we hav