After decades of technology breakthroughs, it brings a smile to my face to think that a vinyl or lacquer platter with mechanically implanted grooves is still, by far, our longest-lived audio format.
~ Kevin Kelly from, https://blog.longnow.org/02008/03/29/worlds-largest-audio-visual-archive/
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Digital storage is ephemeral. That hard drive you copied everything onto and tossed on a shelf? …it’s only ten years before you should no longer trust it to have everything still retrievable, exactly as you wrote it. Home-writable CD-ROMs and DVDs? …they’re about the same: 10 years. Heck, I have audio CDs from the 80s where the commercial-grade coating has failed, and I had to repurchase the albums to get a fresh CD to ‘rip’ when I lost my music collection once back in the 00’s.
I’m definitely not bashing on technology—I’m not a Luddite calling for a return to clay tablets… On the other hand, guess what really lasts? Stone, baby. Clay. Papyrus even.
What I’m saying is that we currently do not have any set-it-and-forget-it digital storage. Instead, you need to be thinking about MOVage—not STORage—keeping your digital files moving forward from copy to copy, from medium to medium.
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