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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

Assuming the file format is documented, also bits remain completely legible throughout time. Perhaps we haven’t yet worked on a redundantly encoded, self documenting file format but eventually we will. At that point in time - assuming all relevant content won’t be copyrighted to death for 1000 years, that’s a big one - we will be able to simultaneously have unfettered access to any content

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Disks exist in two states:

- broken

- about to break

Even poor quality books are mostly readable after decades.

I don't know for certain a single example of any of my disks that have survived since 1990ies although I could hope.

Also books exist in few states, of which only one is useful: well preserved, wet, burnt, torn apart. That’s how entropy works folks! One advantage of books is that the information density is lower so the loss of one specimen isn’t that significant, unless it’s unique

This isn't entirely correct.

A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it.

Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.

A disk will also survive some local data corruption or loss, even recover it and provide warnings sometimes. Catastrophic failure of a disk akin to total combustion of the book. Listen, can we stop this false analogy debate? It’s not advancing the discussion that much

Although if you hit a book with a hammer, it’ll probably fare a bit better...

I try once more:

I have a big shelf of books.

It includes my mothers chemistry book from before I was born as well as a few books bought second hand.

I have maybe one disk from the time I was a teenager.

Yes, fire will destroy a book (although parts will often be recoverable using low tech methods).

The same fire will certainly destroy disks and make them unrecoverable for everyone but recovery labs (if they are recoverable at all.)

Summary: books fail slower than disks. When they fail they often fail gracefully and you can still use them and even repair them using low tech tools.

Disks fail more often. In fact you rarely see working disks from last decade. They fail for a number of reasons and other times seemingly for no reasons at all. When they fail they might have tried to warn you but often they just fail with no warning and unless you work in IT you'll rarely see those warnings anyway. Also after they've actually failed you more likely than not need a recovery lab to get anything back.

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