Most Digital Content Not Stable

brunes69 writes "The CBC is running an article profiling the problems with archiving digital data in New Brunswick's provincial archives. Quote from the story: 'I've had audio tape come into the archives, for example, that had been submerged in water in floods and the tape was so swollen it went off the reel, and yet we were able to recover that. We were able to take that off and dry it out and play it back. If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted'. Given the difficulties with preserving digital data, is it really the medium we should be using for archival purposes?"

Comments

Stone tablets

[IckySplat]

Stone tablets. Just drill a hole for a zero and your away and laughing
Now we just need a large enough area to store them :)

Re:Multiple identical copies?

[t00le]

Any good backup strategy will have multiple media types, so CD/DVD should not be your primary backup media type. If you prefer to have an medium for fast access, then it is still viable. As long as it is not your primary media type, which should be something with tried-and-true longevity.

Re:That's nothing, think of DRM

[Rude Turnip]

And if they didn't insist on DRM in their smoke signals, they might still be a pretty formidable group today.

Re:That's nothing, think of DRM

[vertinox]

The Romans Conquered the Greeks, the Normans conquered the Saxons, etc. The list goes on and on. The case has ALWAYS been that if some other nation wanted your land and you couldn't stand up to them in a military confrontation, then you were gonna loose that land.

As a person who loves to study European antiquity I would point out some flaws in this thinking...

1. When the Romans conquered the Greeks they actually adopted Greek culture and didn't kill off the Greeks.
2. When the Normans conquered the Saxons they didn't kill off the Saxons nor really conquered their land as much as just intermarried with them (Hence Anglo-Saxon Culture)

The only whole sale Genocides that history can come up with is the Crusaders massacre of Jerusalem (which wasn't really as much as hatred of Muslims as it was starving Europeans killing off everyone in the city regardless of religion out of rage of having to starve in the desert for several months) and then the Mongol sack of Baghdad which wasn't over so much as land, but out of spite of the execution of Mongol diplomats (considering they burned and salted the lands made the "take your lands" point of conquering sort of a non-issue).

The genocide and seizure of lands in this scale was never really seen before until the colonization of Americas. It wasn't as much as the Indians could not defend them as much as it was that the westerners thought they were subhuman.

Which sadly we saw again in the European theatre in WW2.