[LINK] Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

[Brendan Scott]

On 04/06/2010 10:58 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> 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

What this doesn't take account of is that a hard disk is somewhat more reproducible than a cuneiform tablet. That the medium does not survive is different from the massage not surviving.