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Comment by ctstover | Hacker News Reader

There are many kinds of paper. Cost is one of the factors in the matrix of trade-offs. Newspaper paper is almost at the extreme low end of the spectrum. There really is paper that could give you 1-2 centuries easily using a monochrome laser printer. Not as good as stone, but does not require windows update.

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The problem is that fire and water will still destroy it. With digital, you can easily just have thousands of copies spread around various data centers and never have to worry about that. The low cost to copy and the ease of transfer are pretty big advantages here. And you get things like easy searching, perfect copies, etc as well.

Nitpick: fire and water will destroy digital copies too.

My point is that the fire in our Chicago datacenter is unfortunate but everything is trivially replicated to Seattle and London. A fire at a physical library usually means total loss of original works, many of which may not exist everywhere. Especially if we're considering "seed store" scenarios. Paper also takes a lot of space, so the amount of data you can store in a facility for x amount of cost will be much less, now you have to employ "curators" to decide whats important instead of just copying everything on the much cheaper digital medium.

> The problem is that fire and water will still destroy it.

Same for digital.

> With digital, you can easily just have thousands of copies spread around various data centers and never have to worry about that.

Same with print. Just replace "data centers" with "libraries".

> The low cost to copy and the ease of transfer are pretty big advantages here.

It's only low cost and easy if you assume the whole computing infrastructure is already available: electrical and networking grid(s), working equipment, compatible software, trained operators, etc. All of that is expensive and, for archival purposes, fragile.

> And you get things like easy searching, perfect copies, etc as well.

No arguments there, but these advantages have little to do with long-term preservation.

The best archival strategy is going to involve multiple types of media. Keep things available on the network for ease of access. Put important things on paper/parchment just in case. Mix in tape/film and other media as needed.

Exactly! With "digital copies" you don't even need to destroy them to render them useless. Just turn off the power!

Not only that, whose to say the program needed to read files from 1000 years ago are still available.

Huh? Hard drives, flash drives, and CD/DVD discs don't stop storing bits when you remove the power.

They don't stop storing bits but to make them useful there are a lot of prerequisites, unlike hard copies.

I agree with that but that isn't what you said in your original comment or maybe I misunderstood you.

You originally said "you don't even need to destroy them to render them useless. Just turn off the power!" I guess turning the lights off makes a book "useless".

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