|
>We have analog records from thousands of years ago, and we still have the technology to use them. I have digital formats from ~25 years ago that can no longer be read. I think the longevity speaks for itself. We do have records from thousands of years ago, and the fact that we can read them is really cool! But, your argument that therefore analog is 'more reliable' is sketchy. It's true that we have many digital formats that can no longer be read today. But there a few things of note. One, this isn't a fair comparison. We have analog records from thousands of years ago, yes, but we also have tons of missing ones. (Beowulf once had only one copy, and that was nearly destroyed in a fire in the 1700s. If someone hadn't been quick to rescue it, we could have no idea of Beowulf.) The vast majority is probably missing. A fairer comparison would be to invent a time machine and fast forward a few hundred years. If any file format from today is still readable, then that can be considered a success. Of course, absent a time machine, there's no real way to test this, but judging analog records only be survivors is flawed. (An incomplete list of books which we are aware of but don't have is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work) Two, water and fire might be equally destructive. But if, in theory, all of the print copies of the books in this collection [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=158633464] get destroyed before digitization, then, so far as we can tell, they're gone. Forever. There's no way of recovering them. But if you can't access the file at HathiTrust anymore, for whatever reason (which might be more likely), there's a copy at the University of Illinois [https://digital.library.illinois.edu/items/bf8640e0-061b-013...] and at HathiTrust [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100008794]. And since HathiTrust has a mirror, in reality it would require three failing simultaneously. Maybe a digital file is more likely to be unreadable or fail in some other way, but there are also many more copies. For a Project Gutenberg work to be inaccessible, all of the sites on this list [https://www.gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL] must fail (in reality, it's less, as many are hosted by the same group; but it's still two continents, four countries, and eight providers) and possibly/probably others. For a rare book collection that isn't digitized, it takes one fire. |