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

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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.

Talk about 8” floppy discs. I, in my younger days, moved digital data from “paper tape”, used by newspapers’ for stories, to digital tape.

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.

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.

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.

... 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”...

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!!

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

Anyone remember IOmega zip drives?

Hadn't you discussed this topic earlier too?

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

Yes. I was a late adopter of digital photography and after a few years I abandoned it and returned to B&W wet photography. Digital images were suffering with every transfer or alternation. I have 35mm negatives from forty years ago that I can print to give crisp and sharp images. The digital archive I have is near useless, the equipment and software is getting difficult to source.