Stone tablets survive millennia after a civilization collapse. Paper records can remain preserved for centuries. There are floppy discs wasting away in a corner of my home office with data from 35 years ago that I can no longer access.
Maybe we don’t have an obligation to future generations to ensure that records from our age remain preserved and accessible, but I honestly wonder if swathes of human history will be lost forever because of our reliance on electronic data storage. Future archaeologists have their work cut out for them.
Yes, this is true. But it was also true of most written documents in all of human history. Paper breaks down and the bulk of it is lost.
I can’t cite this as it is just something I heard, but we have more clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia than actual written records from Rome or Ancient China.
There are projects here and there, not terribly organized to leave time capsules which include books. More of this would probably be better.
Also our garbage dumps that are on scale never seen in history, do an oddly good job of preserving even newspapers for very extended period. So glossy magazines and books in these dumps may well be available to future archaeologists. In fact our dumps will be treasure troves to them.
I was having dinner with friends the other day, one of whom works as an archivist for the county.
And she said they were planning to discontinue storage of paper records in favour of “uploading it to The Cloud.”
A little probing revealed that she wasn’t really clear that data “in the cloud” is still stored in physical form on one or more physical computers in a data centre somewhere, even if there are multiple distributed backup replicas. And that of course there isn’t a single ‘Cloud’… there’s Amazon, Microsoft, Google.. etc etc.
Big companies which seem ‘too big to fail’ today… but that’s been said before…
The advantage of digital storage is how easy (and cheap) it is to make copies. And the copies are (or can be) loss-less; identical to the original.
Info is much less likely to be lost to history if there are lots of copies, stored in different places. [Much of the historical records we have are because they were ‘official proclamations’ from King/Pharaoh/Emperor X that he ordered sent to every province. Even the Rosetta Stone is one such, with the same text in 3 different languages, which is why it was so useful.]
Even old floppy discs from 35 years ago could be read. Even if you no longer have equipment to read them, someone does. Just a matter of being willing to pay them to do it. There is a small business nearby that transfers info from old media, like 8", 5.25", & 3.5" floppies, CDs, photos, slides, super-8 films, VHS/Beta tapes, etc. onto current media. They seem to make a living doing it, busy with wait lists.
And if you are concerned about ‘the cloud’, backup. I have a friend with an extensive collection of photos, now all digital. He stores them on Google, Microsoft, and some other online archives, paying for extra storage on each one. Seems unlikely that all of them would go under at the same time. (I’ve told him the bigger risk is that when he dies, nobody in his family will be interested enough to bother saving this. He should inspire a young relative with the same archivalist instinct.)
Some information was lost because of not getting updated to more modern media. Then we realized the problem, and so it stopped happening. There is no method of data storage that’s fire-and-forget: The only way to preserve data for the long haul is to repeatedly copy it over to new media. And that’s a lot easier to do if it’s digital.
It’s gotten to the point now that everything will be preserved, because with how storage space per price expands, it’s cheaper and easier to preserve everything than it is to figure out which things to not preserve.
I’m seeing this in my own life as well, at work and personally.
At work, the only way to find old water and sewer record plans is digitally. About every 10 years or so, we upgrade to a new database, and everything is copied into the new system. The original paper and Mylar records have all been scattered and lost.
At home, the only files I can reliably find are ones that were digitized.
And last week we spent a day trying to locate hard-copy vehicle titles in an in-law’s house so that the vehicles can be sold. We finally gave up and applied for replacement titles from the state DMV’s [digital] records.
Yes, almost all written material from before the printing press has been lost. Great works like Beowulf survived only as a single, damaged copy. We can estimate how much is lost because of references to works we don’t have. But of course we don’t really know how much existed without leaving any surviving references.
The point about the ease and ubiquity of copying would seem to be true enough. No question it IS cheaper today than it has ever been to copy information digitally. No scribes in monasteries slowly copying ancient scrolls by hand are required. It can be done in mere seconds with a computer and placed into a storage device or on a cloud. This is all indisputably true. However, there are certain assumptions implicit here that cause concern.
Civilizations have collapsed several times previously. The saving grace in each instance in the past has been that the collapses have been limited in scope to being a regional catastrophe. Much of the knowledge associated with Rome, for instance, was preserved thanks to Arabic scholars. Scrolls were moved to more enlightened places like Baghdad where there they remained until monastic scholars in Europe were able to re-aquire and re-distribute that knowledge during the Middle Ages. This worked because the scrolls had a certain durability and transportability that allowed preservation and later transmission to occur. This arrangement didn’t require anything more sophisticated than pen, paper, ink and the knowledge to decipher a language. The printing press was a game changer from this perspective as it greatly sped up the copying and distribution end of things. Digital technology speeds both processes up orders of magnitude faster. The problem today, however, is that a civilization collapse event carries great potential to be a global event. We can no longer rely on sending data to an adjacent unaffected continent for safe preservation. Digital technology requires global supply chains to be functioning and very large systems to be maintained. Production of lithium ion batteries, for example requires extraction and transport of lithium which must be extracted from far flung places as China and Australia. Not to mention the maintenance and operation of sophisticated electrical power grids and the continued manufacturing capacity to produce complex electronic components. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that all that would be available during a civilization collapse event. We may be able to copy and distribute information more efficiently, rapidly and cheaply today but this efficiency has come at the expense of resilience and requires complex industrial and technological solutions to maintain.
For example, I have 25 year old photos on film/prints and some digital ones.
The negatives are still fine, but the prints are discolored now. And the negatives are vulnerable to heat, humidity, bugs, etc.. And just sheer time will eventually degrade them.
Contrast that with the digital photos. They look exactly the same today as the day I shot and downloaded them. And they always will, but at the cost of having to back them up, move them between storage media/locations, and probably at some future point convert them to a more modern format.
If you put in the right effort, digital is more survivable and without degradation. Problem is few people know the “right” effort and do stuff like write their pictures onto a single CD-R in 2010 and stored it in the attic. Then they wonder why their photos are irretrievably gone.
Which is part of why cloud storage is gaining popularity. Yes, there does still need to be some physical medium somewhere, but the cloud storage company is doing all of that active maintenance that individual users (even corporate users) don’t want to bother with.
Of course, that does still depend on the cloud company not going out of business. If you want to be really sure that your data is maintained, store a copy on Google and a copy on Amazon. And then, if either of those companies ever goes bust, find who the new big cloud companies are and store copies with them. Still some level of maintenance required, but only on very long timescales.
Actually, realistically, if (say) Amazon were to go out of the cloud business, the next big cloud company would probably buy up all of Amazon’s accounts and contracts, and the transition would be seamless.
This is absolutely the key. Even within my own lifetime, I have valuable content that’s been copied and re-copied many times from long-obsolete media. Once it’s in digital form, the copying is lossless. The historic record will never die as long as we maintain it.
Not having a 3.5 drive of 5.25 drive I think would only be one hurdle to accessing data stored on a floppy disk for 35 years. I seem to recall magnetic media being vulnerable to cosmic rays, essentially erasing chunks of data (bitflipping?) over only a few years. The damage would be quite extensive over 35, and a thousand years would leave maybe no trace of data. I am also given to understand hard disks and SSD storage is similarly vulnerable. I am not an expert on this and welcome a correction. So, if we were to experience a global collapse–maybe where folks a thousand years hence with the equivalent of an 8th grade education would be elevated to “Royal Smart Person” status–how available would all that cloud-stored data be, even if someone could work out what a server is and how to power it up?