Technology

It does has to be fast enough that you can transfer the files to a different disk within your lifetime.

It certainly would make planning the dang home lab easier. Im in a small place! I don't have room for all the stuff i wanna play with!

Punch cards? Stored correctly there's no reason they couldn't last many human lifetimes. But... Yeah it'll take a while to encode everything.

I would have thought that with modern technology we could come up with something like punch cards but more space/time efficient. Physical storage of data - only one write cycle of course, but extremely durable. Even just the same system as punch cards but using tiny, tiny holes very close together on a roll of paper. Could be punched or read by a machine at high speed (compared to a regular punch card, presumably still Ber slow compared to flash media).

Tape is cheap and durable if you store it properly. Except the tape drive is expensive af.

Microsoft is working on glass storage. A glass plate can last 10,000 years according to Microsoft. Hopefully that tech will get miniaturized and available to consumers within our lifetimes.

Sad little human. I have written my treatises into the warp and weft of reality itself. I have twisted my curiosity into the folds of your DNA and stamped my waxing madness into the ragged edges of the telomeres that mark your days as numbered. I have made of the stars a celestial QR code that burns across the skies of every planet, that burns across the eyes of every ape who stares into the night and asks "why?". I announced The Work with a bang of gas and light and awe and set time itself into motion so my scripture could expand eternally into the infinite, benighted expanse.

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?

In some cases we do. For example, the documents at Pompeii, those at Qumran, and other rare instances where documents have been preserved from the time they're written. It's also true that we have far more copies than originals, and that we've lost most of the works of many ancient authors.

But we do have originals of many other texts. Like vast, vast amounts of cuneiform texts because they were usually pressed into a clay tablet and then baked.

All but four Mayan paper codices were burned, but the Mayans loved carving their stories into rocks and making those rocks part of their cities' architecture, so we still have a lot of their textual information. Same with the Egyptians- they wrote a lot on papyrus, and most of that is lost, but they also carved and painted all over tombs.

The secret is not to keep copying the texts. That introduces errors and those errors can compound. The secret is to preserve the texts in a medium which will only degrade over exceptionally long periods of time (compared to a human life, anyway).

If you had a device which could carve stored data into stone and make it retrievable again, you could potentially preserve that data for thousands of years.

There is: mdiscs. Allegedly 1000 years durability even in Blu-ray format. Should be good enough for most important things. The best tapes AFAIK 30- 100 years

Citing Alessandro Barbero

Updoot just for this

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?

We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We'd probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn't been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There's a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That's why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.

(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn't have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)

Many films and tv programs survive only thanks to a total stranger keeping their own copy. For a long term survival of any media it has to be copied and distributed far and wide.

What is really being discussed here is archiving of master recordings and session files. The publically avaliable releases themselves aren't really in jeopardy. Orthough piracy probably does provide an extra layer of security to more obscure releases.