[LINK] Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

[Kim Holburn]

I found an article in New Scientist (30 Jan 2010) on a subject we have  
discussed before here.  How long our mounting cloud of digital data  
will last.  Compared with say Babylonian cuniform tablets from 3500  
years ago the answer is not long.   They have a chart:
Flash memory: 10 Years
Magnetic tape: about 20 years
Rewritable CDs and DVDs: 7 years
Most CD-R and DVD+R, DVD-R, audio CD and Movie DVDs: 26 years
Special gold CD-R: 100 years
Hard disks: no-one knows.

And that's assuming we have the ability to read them then.  Reading  
media made in old drives is not necessarily easy at all.  Less easy if  
the drives are not available even less easy if no engineers familiar  
with them are still alive.  Maybe our digital society is just  
evanescent.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.300-digital-doomsday-the-end-of-knowledge.html

...

> A century or so after a major catastrophe, little of the digital age  
> will remain beyond what's written on paper. "Even the worst kind of  
> paper can last more than 100 years," says Season Tse, who works on  
> paper conservation at the Canadian Conservation Institute. The  
> oldest surviving "book" printed on paper dates from AD 868, he says.  
> It was found in a cave in north-west China in 1907.

....

> Part of the trouble is that there is no market in eternity.  
> Proposals to make a paper format that could store digital data for  
> centuries using symbols akin to bar codes have faltered due to a  
> lack of commercial interest and the challenge of packing the data  
> densely enough to be useful.


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request