<story><title>Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kzeg4/archivists-are-uploading-hundreds-of-random-vhs-tapes-to-the-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>allovernow</author><text>How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I&amp;#x27;ve read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media.&lt;p&gt;My oldest files are from 1977 - proof:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;DigitalMars&amp;#x2F;Empire-for-PDP-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;DigitalMars&amp;#x2F;Empire-for-PDP-10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My files have gone from magtape to 8&amp;quot; floppy to various 5.25&amp;quot; floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size.&lt;p&gt;(My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I&amp;#x27;m sure there was nothing but crap on them, but it would be fun to see what kind of crap it was.</text></comment>
<story><title>Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kzeg4/archivists-are-uploading-hundreds-of-random-vhs-tapes-to-the-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>allovernow</author><text>How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I&amp;#x27;ve read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tialaramex</author><text>If you want data to survive you&amp;#x27;ve always needed to copy it. Digital storage just makes that easier to do in bulk. Copying Bibles was a full time task for huge teams of monks but you can (and should) make backups routinely on a daily or weekly basis with barely a thought.</text></comment>