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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Historians likely won't, as the fragility of our media and our near-ubiquituous use of disk encryption will likely result in almost all of our modern data being either unreadable or unusable.

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Archivists are continually saving artifacts from our time, both analog and digital. There'll be plenty to study in the future.

No worries, all the pictures will be safely archived by the NSA.

Encryption, maybe. But I wouldn't count on fragile media remaining beyond the next 20 years. Some crystal based storage mediums have silly things done to them, like being heated to 1,000 degrees for two hours, to demonstrate their durability.

What is fragile media?

Well, by reasonable context anything you can't leave lying around for a couple of decades and expect to work, or stick in a reasonably constant environment and expect to be around in a hundred years. HDDs, optical discs - that sort of thing, I'd consider to tend to be fairly fragile.

Anything that wouldn't be accessible to historians in the same sense that photographic stuff is basically.

Color film degrades fairly quickly. It won't last 100 years unless it's constantly climate controlled.

Shouldn't factory-pressed CDs and DVDs last indefinitely?

It's easy to think that, but no. The materials will degrade and the data will become unreadable sooner than you think, probably on the order of 10s of years, depending on the manufacturing quality.

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