Technology

Yeah if you're looking for long term it needs to be archival media. Many people think the flash drive will hold it forever but they are potentially the most fickle.

Well, nothing lasts forever. I'd say distributing them on something that lasts 10+ years is better than doing noting. Otherwise they just get lost, buried in the attic or the next harddrive crash takes them.

I have a feeling USB drives will be readable for a long time to come, considering that we still use the standard almoat everywhere, nearly 28 years after its introduction.

That said, copying the data from old archives into new formats is always a good idea

It's not a bad start though, and how hard would it be for the people who have surviving copies to copy it to "the next best new thing" in 10 years? The problem is of course that sequence would need to be continued on, like a tradition, which is doable as well.

I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable

This is important, and for some media, it should be more often than that.

People forget that flash memory uses electrical charge to store data. It's not durable. If left unpowered for too long, that data will get corrupted. A failure might not even be visible without examining every bit of every file.

Keep backups. Include recovery data (e.g. PAR2) with them. Store them on multiple media. Keep them well-maintained. Copy them to new storage devices before the old ones become obsolete.

It's funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

These people haven't heard of zfs then?

Buy Spinrite. It's not perfect but it's the best thing available for drive maintenance and recovery. I have used it for over 10 years. If the drive is dying it'll take forever, but I've recovered data that was nearly gone due to sector loss. It goes down to the bit level BTW. Someday Steve will release v7 .. someday.

That's why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you'd want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?

In my life I've had several HDD's and SSD's fail on me. None of that shit lasts forever and you would honestly be surprised how often they fail. For huge servers like data centers the average failure rate is between 1% and 2% per year, and sometimes even higher. They literally have to replace hard drives on a daily basis because of failure.

Disk failure is one of the reasons I have copies of all of my important stuff saved to every hard drive on my computer, along with an external just in case. One time my system drive failed and I couldn't save anything because my operating system stopped working. Had to reinstall the OS and do a data recovery. Ended up with a bunch of photos that were corrupted, distorted, or missing half the photo.

I still have a dvdr and good quality discs stored properly can last decades. Not perfect and harder and harder to find readers, but for long term backups its an affordable solution.

That shouldnt be all doom like.

Easiest thing is to make 2-3 copies of usbs and label the date the usb began its use, put a rough estimate on when the next generation should repeat the whole process until the pictures become irrelevent.

how music is so complicated to archive now

??