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Comment by mapcars | Hacker News Reader

>You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee

Not really, those future people don't just come out of nowhere. It's a gradual, incremental change as there are still systems using tape storage the technology or formats are not lost but migrated.

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That depends on the time scales we're talking about. 30 years? Probably (and even then there are problems with abandoned/little-documented formats like Word 3.x). 300 years, and a historian will have a hard time decoding a digital file from the year 2019, even assuming the media is still intact. 3000 years and a nuclear war can make a weird shiny disc appear as a currency or a cult item for an archaeologist, not as a knowledge storage.

This assumes an unbroken chain of people devoting time and resources to migrating the data. Any gap would mean that data is lost or requires much more expense to recover.

Find a 3.5" floppy disk from 1995 with WordPerfect files on it and see how much effort it takes you to get the documents back. Now imagine 100 years have passed.

think nuclear war that wipes out 99.999% of earths human population. Even the few computers that remain would become useless because there's no power, fall apart due to degredation/weathering, and ignored because people will have much higher priorities like finding food and surviving, than preserving what would then be the previous generation's technology.

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