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by matt-attack
2563 days ago
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> 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. |
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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)