> I call it rock solid durability.

Literally! But this is survivor bias: you only see a piece that remained intact for 5k years, and I bet 99% of them were eroded/destroyed over time.

While survivor bias is relevant, I strongly doubt any modern transaction stored digitally in a DB such as Postgres could last 5k years.

3 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

tonyhart7 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

but they can tho??? no one said about transferring such data into another disk

The IBM 80-hole punch card will only turn 100 in 2028. Who knows what the world will look like in 2128.

I bet the clay tablet will be just fine. No word on moldy cards.

	▲	thaumasiotes 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Note that it isn't the norm for clay tablets to survive. We have lots of them, far more than we're willing to provide the manpower to read, but in most cases[1] that's not because they were made to be durable. Whenever a city was conquered, the tablets there were immortalized as the city burned down. But cities that didn't get sacked didn't burn down, and their tablets could be lost. For example, we don't have the clay records from Hammurabi's reign in Babylon, because (a) he was a strong king, and Babylon wasn't conquered on his watch; and (b) he reigned a long time ago, and that period of Babylon sank below the water table, dissolving all the records. [1] Some tablets were intentionally fired for posterity.