27 Oct
2009
27 Oct
'09
5:52 p.m.
Daniel Seagraves wrote:
Who says we have to pick just one method of
preservation? Why can't we
try doing many? I would think the redundancy would benefit everyone.
Electronic
documents can be copied easily. So it's easy to have them
sitting in several places at once. If Al's house with bitsavers and all
his backups burns down (I explicitely do NOT hope that!), bitsavers
would still be around. Even if Al WANTED it to go away - no chance.
The drawback Al pointed out - digital media lifetime - can be considered
as a problem. Digital data storage needs a constant effort to keep the
data. Paper can degrade, yes. But if you stop caring for it for long
time, you have a much better chance to get anything out of the paper
than out of some long forgotten (and probably rotten) digital media.
Stainless steel "paper" tapes would be a long lasting machine readable
option - but the storage density is poor...
Regards,
Philipp