[xoa]

I don't disagree with that at all! I did try to say (maybe unclearly) that having simpler more foolproof and failsafe layers at every level seems absolutely worth pursuing anyway, where possible. But I also wonder whether some of the common wisdom is from an age that is obsolete for many scenarios? Ie., in the 80s and 90s and even early 00s there was a lot more churn, practices were less standardized, computing time was more expensive, storage capacity was far more expensive, the ratio of software to data size was higher, etc. The latter seems to tie into "must assume the original executable is either not available or not able to be executed." For serious archiving, does it no make sense to just bundle in not merely the executable, but in some instances an entire environment? In a "fall of civilization" type scenario that may not be helpful vs a clear simple spec and ease of bootstrapping, but for situations where technological continuity is a limiting factor for some reason anyway is it safe to simply assume basics like at this point x86 will never go away as something that is at least virtualized? In my own experience there is a pretty clear cutoff date after which I can continue to run the entire environment in a VM.

Again this is shooting the breeze a bit, article is discussing a case where there should be the freedom to choose better formats. But for a lot of important archive material, including software itself, are we getting to the point where many long term archives should simply including everything necessary to deal with them in the present day as a container or VM image, which is then stored with a solid amount of parity and replication?

[matt-attack]

> many long term archives should simply including everything necessary to deal with them in the present day as a container or VM image

Unfortunately, any such image would presume you have access to the hardware, or it has low-level instruction sets/processor design baked in. Think how many PDP-11's are around today. And in terms of an archive it's only been 50 years since the PDP-11 was invented. That's a blink of an eye in terms of archival standards.

[theamk]

> Think how many PDP-11's are around today.

Why does it matter how many physical machines are alive? There are tons of emulators around. There is even one in Javascript, with an ability to load disk images as well.

The hard part is hardware - the drives go bad, the computers fail. But disks grow, and it is getting simpler and cheaper to store lots of data. As long as you keep copying the files to modern media every 10 years or so, you should no longer have anybdata loss.

(The only exception is proprietary data formats which cannot be opened except by original program which cannot be run in VM easily. Those should be avoided at all costs)