Are We at Risk of Losing Our Digital Information Over Time?

✅ Watch next ▶ No, Not Stone Tablets ▶ https://youtu.be/eC8YNhLbMqQ

Great video! You hit the nail on the head. I still have data on 3.5 in floppies. Fortunately I have an external floppy drive but it is on its last legs. I have noticed that copying to CDs and DVDs is "yesterday's tech" and the way to go is cloud storage. Thank you, but I would rather keep control of my data in my own system. I know I am a Luddite, but papers, research projects, and other projects get printed out and put in binders. I don't want my data to become hostage when cloud services change, costs go up, etc. I will continue to back up to current media, but I am noticing some degradation with data and papers generated 10 years ago. But I am doing better: I just got rid of an entire box of data punch cards from the 70s. Just can't find a punch machine anymore.

Dude your advice, both on this subject and on dealing with change is so very much on point. I really get a lot from your channel. Thanks.

I started building my DVD collection 18 years ago. Recently I discovered some of them were becoming un-readable, some actually de-laminating. So, I've embarked on a long term project to back up my DVD's to a 20TB hard drive...and not just as ISO's but also as MP4's. In 3-5 years, I'll buy another 20+TB hard drive and copy the whole collection on to it. 1,000TB optical media is on the horizon, so I may even move to that...if I can afford it.

... as a German Biologist - ... the moment I learned in our German High School in the 1970´s about the Burning of the Library of Alexandria - I got instantly traumatized for Life and since that moment tried to gather as many books as possible for my own private library. I lost already several Terabytyes on failing HDDs and my trauma becomes Hell... the scientific part is WHAT is so valuable to keep forever? Mosis came down from the mountain with 2 tablets written with the “Finger of GOD” lost forever ... Blessed are those who do not read and think then nothing is ever”important”...

Copying was not confined to the middle ages. Prior to the typewriter and carbon paper, every business letter had to be copied by hand as a file record.

in state archives they still give to read in auditoriums a 130 years old paper books in excellent condition, hard disks are worse than cds if used constantly, industry standard life for hds is only 4 years after which every server farm must change all their storage fleet to new ones, industry tuned to make money from that redundancy, never make anything sturdy

Of course, the amount updated to be backed up has grown exponentially. Music, images, and high definition video. Also. No archive media is perfect. For example, Hard drives are susceptible to physical failure, magnetic degradation, etc. also, try to find a computer that can read a MFM drive. The only solution is to invent time travel so we can go back and retrieve our lost data!!

Just last week one of my External HDDs failed and I found it had all the data but most of it was corrupted or not even copying. It wasn't even very old. I bought it in 2019

6:10 This is already the case with older Word .doc files. You can still read them but shouldn't create new .doc files. For this only .docx files should be created.

This is not a problem for me, as I don't have any data worth copying or saving.

Anyone using that wavy blue thing in the background is at risk of losing their data if the corporation behind it decides it's not worth keeping.

I was worried my videos where I step on legos would disappear. What a relief.

This phenomenon is the reason I always have to laugh when I see the people on various Star Trek shows being able to instantly access the computer records of ships that were abandoned centuries ago or civilizations that died out millennia ago.

I appreciate the optimism but I feel it may be incorrect. I give you an example the UK BBC's "Doomsday Project" of the early 80's. There were literally thousands of copies of the database made and distributed. However I don't believe there is still a readable copy of the Laserdisk media and, even if there was, it may be the case that there is not a suitable Laserdisk player to read it or software to drive it. The entire dataset has been lost in less than 30 years yet the original Doomsday Project, on which it was based, was written in the 11th century is still viewable as it is in a human readable form on "archival" quality media ... With some exceptions, the primary aim of scribes was to distribute media, not to make back-up copies of data.

Anyone remember IOmega zip drives?

Hadn't you discussed this topic earlier too?

Dbase is gone but DBF is still around...sorta

CD's degrade over time and in the future may not be readable

If you have space to store items, then consider not tossing your old computer. It might come in handy. I have a game, Lode Runner, that was developed when the 8086 CPU was all the rage. That game's speed is based on your computer's speed. If played on any of today's computers, the games ends in the blink of an eye. So I kept my ancient Quantus X/T computer. I also kept an old monitor, to be able to plug it in. There are ways to emulate the game on a modern computer. But it is not the same as the real thing. ..... I have a few 15k RPM, 73 GB SCSI based hard drives, when they were considered to have huge capacity and be faster than a speeding bullet. I want to see what I have on those drives, from the 1990s. But I have no way to plug them in. I tossed out the computer with the SCSI controller. No one makes a SCSI -> USB adapter. So I would have to find a SCSI card and a PC with an available slot, and find the cables for the drives, and it is an expense and a hassle, all of which would have been avoided if I did not toss my old computer that was SCSI based. At the time, SCSI was the high-end choice over IDE based drives. It was used by businesses world-wide. So I thought nothing of tossing out my old Gateway 2000, 66 mHz DX/2 PC with its LSI SCSI controller. And I was either too dumb or too poor (or both) to make copies of everything before I dumped the old computer. Now I want to erase the drives before selling them or dumping them, and I have no way to see what is on the drives or to erase them. A hard drive degausser costs thousands. Should I pay a service to degause the drives? Is it worth the expense. Can I trust them to take possession of my drives? I will not hand over my drives to strangers. I am kicking myself for not having at least saved the SCSI card and cables from that old PC. That is a mistake I will not repeat.