Timeline for Permanent storage
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 8, 2013 at 1:56 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek | I think there was a similar question on superuser. At some point someone suggested stone tablets ;p | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 21:34 | answer | added | Ask Bjørn Hansen | timeline score: 2 | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 3:51 | comment | added | Ward - Trying Codidact Mod | Digital is fine, but you can't just dump stuff on a drive and leave it - you need to maintain it. My archives have gone from CD to DVD to hard drives and are getting close to needing to move to bigger hard drives. File formats are an issue, anything beyond images, text, and PDF is questionable. I think I can still convert my oldest MS-Word 5.0 (for DOS) documents, but I haven't done it yet and it'll be a pain... I'm never gonna bother with whatever old Wordperfect and Lotus Improv files I've got. | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 23:44 | history | reopened | Mark HendersonMod | ||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 21:13 | history | closed |
HopelessN00b EEAA pauska Basil MadHatter |
off topic | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 17:40 | comment | added | HopelessN00b | Right, like Chris points out, don't go digital. In addition to finding equipment to read the media, you also need software to interpret the format, and there are some proprietary data encoding schemes from the early days of computing that have been lost. And on an even more fundamental level, who's to say that we'll still use binary-based (base2) computers 100 years from now? | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 17:34 | comment | added | Chris S Mod | Side note: You probably want to avoid anything digital at all. The items we have from 100+ years ago are all very basic technologically speaking. There might be CDs that last 50 years, but finding a CD drive might be hard. There are plenty of 20 year old formats that I don't have the equipment to read anymore (5.25" floppies spring to mind). But paper, we have 1000 year old paper that's still around (carefully preserved). I'd pick a material more substantial than paper, but just pointing out the nature. | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 17:01 | answer | added | user9517Mod | timeline score: 5 | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 16:48 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 21:18 | |||||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 16:44 | comment | added | George Profenza | @HopelessN00b Interesting, maybe I should think of a digital rather than physical solution ? Would having data stored on a cloud service work if it gets moved to a newer cloud solution every once in a while (can't expect AWS to last 100 years for example, but perhaps the internet and cloud services in general might still be in some form or another) ? Would there be a way to sort of 'automate' that ? | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 16:35 | answer | added | voretaq7Mod | timeline score: 5 | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 16:34 | history | edited | voretaq7Mod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 20 characters in body
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| Apr 4, 2013 at 16:34 | comment | added | HopelessN00b | 100 years ago, "computers" were (gigantic) glorified calculators that used gears. 100 years from now, computers will probably be as different from today's computers as today's computers are from what the 1910's had to offer. So I recommend not trying to solve this fundamentally unsolvable problem. If you want to make your data last for 100 years (for whatever reason), you need to keep moving it to newer and newer systems and formats, so it's in an up-to-date form when you die, and someone else (presumably) takes over the task. | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 16:24 | history | asked | George Profenza | CC BY-SA 3.0 |