[castwide]

The disagreement here seems to be about what kind of data should be considered ephemeral. Traffic logs from a decade ago? A ten-year-old package lock? I'm sure I don't care anymore. Documents I wrote in the 90s? Yeah, I might still want them. I might not need them everyday, but I can say from experience that I've needed to track down files that are more than a decade old, and I'm glad I was able to find them.

[TZubiri]

We strictly talking documents? It's very unlikely they will suffer from any decay since they are so lightweight. And to the extent that it's important you probably accessed it or shared it sometime in that period.

A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.

[castwide]

I'm talking documents in a very general sense. It might be a text file, audio, video, a software installer, source code, or anything at all.

> A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.

My point is that the video shouldn't decay, either. It might not be playable in modern media software for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't automatically make it a candidate for deletion.

[erik_seaberg]

If I learned of a old video of my grandparents, but a robot destroyed it, I would be furious. (Photos are what actually remain from their era.)

[TZubiri]

Oh yeah, taking screenshots would be a nice intermediate decay, instead of the whole video.

You have to think, in general, that we have finite resources, and the alternative is not remember everything in perfect detail, but forgetting things that you do not choose to forget.

Better to choose what we forget.

[erik_seaberg]

After forty-ish years, the limit on personal storage is ever higher. The sum of every filesystem I ever owned will probably fit on two of today's very affordable hard drives. (I should get on that for pre-cloud stuff.)

And decayed versions wouldn't get the author much mercy from bereaved families.

[TZubiri]

1- moore's law will break eventually. Depending on storage growing is unsustainable. We will need to develop solutions that work when storage growth becomes linear.

2- even if you can save the bits and bytes, there's fidelity loss in soft and hard standards, namely video codecs and connector standards. Not sure how planned decay would fit here, but relevant considering that document from the 90s needs is probably on a weird codec in a pre pata drive. Or even worse an analog medium.

Even if you don't admit that it will happen in this generation, it will happen in the next. We have companies that offer free storage like google, the economics can't sustain that forever, youtube videos are already being purged, google drive limited.

The cost of storing forever is unsustainable over the decades.

[erik_seaberg]

If you're trying to upgrade or rebuild ten year old software, it's very important to know exactly what its dependencies were and where to find them, because there are too many other versions to choose from and most of them won't work. New software only needs a lockfile because it will eventually get old (if useful).

[castwide]

Fair point. But that just means the breadth of files that might need to be preserved is even broader than I suggested.