10 years ago I was sitting and chatting with my room mate and his mother. There is very little about most conversations that I remember clearly, but I did remember this: the more sophisticated our means of storing information, the more fragile it becomes. Cave paintings have endured the ravages of time for thousands of years while the paper in books will have turned to dust long before. Even books though last for hundreds of years.
Data stored on disk though, that is truly short lived. Even if you are quite fastidious in keeping track of your files. The will disappear much sooner than their hard copy formats.
When I first started using computers in third or fourth grade they used 5 1/4" disks. By the time I was in high school I was using a 3 1/2" disks with CD-ROM coming in. Now computers are no longer sold with floppy disk drives (unless you ask).
Even on popular storage mediums such as CD/DVD digital deterioration is an issue. Especially, when preserving digital history.
And what guarantees will there be that the operating systems of 10, 20, or 100 years in the future will even be able to access today's important data. The books on the shelf will remain.
How will we preserve our own histories? I'm not talking about the big stuff in the Library of Congress, but our personal memories--our digital photographs, movies, and diaries/blogs? How do we preserve our histories for our later generations of our families?
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I am constantly aware and frightened of how easy it is to loose years and years of my photography. And in fact I recently had this happen when my main image ext. drive went kaput. Thankfully my brother was able to retrieve the 270+ gigs of data.
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