[bee_rider]

That recovery is much easier though, it is using the device as intended.

And of course, rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete, so even going a step further and recovering deleted content is hardly magic.

This is more like if, sometime in the future, they somehow successfully reconstructed a snapshot of our computers’ volatile memory by examining the power supply, or something ridiculous like that.

[the8472]

> rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete,

On HDDs. On SSDs it'll lead to now-unusued space getting TRIMed which actually erases the blocks. Back to scraping the papyrus.

[nindalf]

Big if.

We’ll lose a lot of digital data simply because we won’t have the means to read it. CD-readers aren’t manufactured anymore in volume. It’s easy to imagine society in 40 years not having any CD readers handy but having a bunch of CDs they want to read. Now multiply that by all the funny storage formats we’ve created over the years.

[bornfreddy]

No need for a CD reader if you have a CT scanner and software that converts those ridges into bits. The bigger question is how well preserved those CDs will be.

[bee_rider]

I’m almost certain it is impossible to actually do what I said. But then again, I bet anybody 2000 years ago would say the same of reading scrolls that have been consumed by a volcano!