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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

How many of our photos from today will be view able in 100 years? I worry we are entering into the start of a digital black hole as far as our history. We've done a wonderful job in ensuring that we can digitize everything, but not so good with reformatting it all as the march of technology moves on. Film and Silver prints, are quite durable comparatively.

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Digital data is easy to copy around as long as you keep up with it, but people don't realize that most media will definitely not last 100 years stuck in a closet. Especially those CD backups you burned in 2005. You might have trouble getting even 10 years out of those. Even your hard drives will crap out sooner or later. Keeping data in a name-brand cloud service might be the best low-maintenance solution for now, as long as you move it if they ever go out of business. But what if the person with the password gets hit by a bus?

When I die, all my pictures and thoughts and work will be lost on my personal laptop. It isn't encrypted, but my family wouldn't know how to get past the OS password. The age of perusing the belongings of dead people is past, for better or worse.

And how about letters? We have tons of letters from famous people pre-2000, but now their thoughts and communications will be lost locked up on email servers unless either party goes out of their way to save them. Privacy is good, but losing data of historical value is unfortunate.

I actually put a lot of thought into these issues. http://mrgris.com/blog/2013-03-27-survivorship-in-the-digita.... My solution is way too complex for a lay-person, though.

> My solution is way too complex for practical use, though.

That looks really interesting. I may actually put this to use.

Very interesting. Not sure I would go to all that for after I'm gone. But it sounds like a cool way to make some sort of puzzle activity for friends. :)

I'm just thinking about things like public records and archives for a start, personal images and data is another problem.

> When I die, all my pictures and thoughts and work will be lost on my personal laptop. It isn't encrypted, but my family wouldn't know how to get past the OS password. The age of perusing the belongings of dead people is past, for better or worse.

It's an interesting thought that I have entertained as well, but at the same time, we have so many pictures/documents nowadays that virtually NOBODY is going to go through your files even if they can get access to them. We used to live with a few rolls of photo films used per year and maybe dozens of letters written, now we have thousands of emails every year, thousands if not dozens of thousands of pictures every year, there's too much noise in the data to make it worth trying to find anything relevant.

As for photos, I know that I personally print out photo albums of the most worthy trips, and my guess is that this kind of stuff will remain, somehow, longer than the digital files.

Digital files' issues is not just about the format they are saved on. Will we be able to read IDE hardrives 100 years from now ? How about SCSI ? How about the formats we use nowadays ? Will the be completely obsolete and potentially unreadable 100 years from now ? How about the OS, file systems we will use ? There's really no way you can predict anything to cover all the "wrong" things that can occur in a long time from now.

100 years from now, technoarchaeology grad students will be writing jpg parsers in Z# because nobody can figure out how to compile the old ones on quantum CPUs.

>there's too much noise in the data to make it worth trying to find anything relevant //

Sounds like a challenge to a group of hackers, no?

I was interested in the algorithms used by Facebook for their anniversary video clips they did a few months back. Likes and other indicators obviously were used. I changed my profile pic as part of a gag and their algo picked up on that as an indicator that it was important to me - though it was actually the least important of my profile pics. There was also a joke post that got lots of likes from acquaintances that was wrongly promoted as the most important. Others videos worked pretty well though.

I'd think some linguistic analysis along with indicators like numbers of emails exchanged would allow a corpus to be gleaned that had potential to represent one's [email] life quite well.

Similarly with photos, images with the most members of family or those that have been viewed most often ... etc. ...

There's probably already a "life digest" app around somewhere that one can run against a user account.

I can imagine in the future a personal computer (like in Her) saying things like "your dad visited this area, here are a few of the photos he took" when you go on holiday or something.

Consider the fact that the Library of Congress doesn't even allow modern color negative and transparency films into its archives, let alone digital files! Only silver based negatives and prints that have gone through a very specific washing method are allowed in, as they pass the "500 year" test.

I've actually been shooting a lot more black and white film these days, on the off-off chance that someone will want to look at my pictures some day.

Buy one of these: http://www.mdisc.com/

And you are good for way more than a hundred years.

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised that someone is thinking about longevity of recorded data. Thanks!

Looks like an excuse to upgrade my Thinkpad docking station with something like this http://support.lenovo.com/ru_RU/product-and-parts/detail.pag...

and I should be able to write disks that last? Sounds good.

Someone probably should still carve instructions on how to build a Blu-Ray reader into a few traditional stone tablets. Hopefully whoever reads it in 1,000 years won't assume "Laser" is the name of our fertility goddess.

Maybe this doesn't count under your definition of "viewable" but I'm sure one would be able to recover a very high number of photos. If not from the remains of a single hard drive, than from the remains of many hard drives that had once saved or cached that photo. (again, technically and physically challenging, I know)

My argument is more - there will be a time in the future (probably in my lifetime) where there are no modern computers that can read jpeg - much less the multitude of raw formats so many people seem to want to store their images in.

We've seen it with obsolete video tape formats, and other media too. The only real preservation method with digital is to keep it in either online storage, and then reformat it to whatever the current is - or transform it back to analog and store that.

Jpeg is already more than 20 years old and there are multiple liberally licensed implementations. Between that and the tendency for people to emulate everything, I don't think it will be a problem to read jpeg in the future.

There's open code for the raw formats too.

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