Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.

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alok-g 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed is common in some places (owing to corruption or what). "Local in scope" but rampant. Digitization has been a panacea as there is more control over the records, but now more prone to hacking.

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AndroTux 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Old piece of paper is quite accessible

If stored properly.

So are digital copies, though. If stored properly.

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RandomLensman 21 hours ago | parent [-]

You need a machine (hardware and software) to read digital copies, not just the digital copies.

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AndroTux 19 hours ago | parent [-]

And you need to know how to read to read paper copies. Same thing, essentially. Anyone speaking hieroglyphics fluently? Point is, if you take care of your archive and make sure it remains accessible, it doesn't really matter whether it's digital or analog.

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RandomLensman 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Not at all the same thing - what equipment do you need to read hieroglyphs on top of understanding the language (which goes for digital, too)? If you have the paper and understand the language, that's it. We already can see that accessing old digital data isn't necessarily easy if it wasn't always kept on/converted to current media and formats (will we keep that up for millenia)?

And both storage can be broken, needing reconstruction.

If I were to give you a 70y old book in English vs some 70y tape with data on - which one is easier to read?

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AndroTux 14 hours ago | parent [-]

For the third time: IF you take care of the data, it’s fine in both cases. If you neglect your beloved book for 70 years and store it under a bridge, it’s going to be completely useless as well. The key part is the taking care of your medium.

	▲	RandomLensman 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The taking care of the book for 70y does not involve recreating the book over and over again to keep it readable or keeping a reading machine in working condition (or be able to recreate it). It's an entirely different level of care. If the medium isn't destroyed, it is directly readable if it's a book, but not necessarily so in digital because hardware and software is needed - just taking care of the original medium isn't enough in digital over centuries.

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wongarsu 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There have been plenty of instances of paper-based land registries being wiped out. It's just usually a very local problem because paper lends itself more to decentralized storage

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RandomLensman 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, so quite limited in scope. We have no experience with storing and keeping accessible electronic records for hundreds of years, though, but we know already that accessing old storage media and formats isn't necessarily easy.

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tredre3 18 hours ago | parent [-]

So far accessing old storage media from 50+ years ago hasn't really been a problem. Reading old tapes and punch cards/tapes or even early hard drives is something that a single motivated hobbyist can achieve in a few weeks or months with a microcontroller and patience.

But it's more difficult to imagine that 1000 years from now someone will be able to read from a PCI-E NVME drive if the specs get lost along the way (ignoring for a moment that flash storage most likely won't retain data that long).

	▲	RandomLensman 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would not call needing weeks or months not a problem (assuming you also get the potentially proprietary software to understand the data recovered). Also, early hard drives weigh 100s of kilograms, so just physically handling them is difficult. Totally agree on accessing NVME example.