No Data Lasts Forever - The Cool Blog

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2024-09-23 16:00:03

No matter what you do, no data will last forever. You hard drive will fail. Your backup drives will fail. Tech companies will go under and sell off their assets. Optical Discs will rot. Books will decompose. Even if none of these things happen, a natural or manmade disaster could come by and destroy it all anyway.

I know this isn’t what I said I was going to publish next but this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and I need to share it. Throughout human history, we’ve been inventing better ways of recording information. From stone engravings to papyrus to paper to punched cards to spinning disks to flash memory. Each leap in data storage has led to massive changes in society. The printing press led to the mass production of books and the spread of new ideas and information. With the development computers and the storage mediums for them such as floppy disks, hard disks, optical media, and more, we went from having massive rooms full of filing cabinets to being able to store the same amount of data on a small device that sits on our desks. We went from having shelves full of photo albums and having to go to libraries to look up information to being able to access it all from the comfort of our own homes and eventaully wherever we want whenever we want. There’s a problem that occurs with each of these innovations however. Every new method of storing data is more fragile then the last.

All data degrades and eventually disappears unless an effort is made to care for and maintain it. The ancient Greeks and Romans wrote on papyrus scrolls much like the Egyptians. Papyrus scrolls can last a long time in the dry deserts of Egypt. In the humid climates of Europe and the Mediterranean, papyrus will decompose and rot away after a few hundred years. As such, we have very very few original copies of any Greek or Roman writing from this time. The only reason we have any of the writings of figures such as Plutarch, Aristotle, or Cicero is because Christian monks and Islamic Scholars in the early middle ages found it important to collect these scrolls and transcribe them onto more durable materials before they rotted away. It’s because of the work of these people 1500 years ago that today we know about events such as the civil wars caused by Julius Caesar, his assassination, the fall of the Roman Republic, or that there even was a Roman Republic.