117
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
117 points (100.0% liked)
technology
24443 readers
213 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
All data will be lost eventually. Catastrophically or piecemeal.
Even though everything dies you should still try to keep it alive the best you can regardless
No, sorry, I mean digital data. Like all these computer stuff. It is a severe problem that we don't really have a way to backup out enormous amounts of data in a way that will last, say, 100 years. We're currently living in a dark age.
There is absolutely tech that can store digital files for centuries or potentially millennia e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/project-silicas-advances-in-glass-storage-technology/
It's expensive to store and slow to read, so it can only be used as an archival format for the most important data, but it does exist nonetheless.
Sure, there's lots of solutions that exist, but realistically most data will not be backed up with this, and even if it were we have to store them somewhere very safe. But let's say we move past our current compression algorithms, error correction methods, even binary computers. We could be at a point where one catastrophic data loss renders them unreadable. At the speed tech moves, it could happen 30-50 years after they're made.
m-discs and blurays supposedly will last many centuries with data intact in a dry cave, but can't store very much per disc.
Yeah, storage capacity is a big part of the issue. We can carve data into stone, but not a lot.
There was an announcement some months back that a very durable, very high capacity data crystal had been made in a lab, but I can't comment on the prospects for such tech becoming widely accessible.
My toddler has entered the chat
TBF most storage media are weak to toddler
I’ve found the most resilient storage format is board books and even they take a beating after a while
Oh right muh bad