Paul Cantrell on Nostr: Back in 1999 or so, I was on the team that helped Minnesota Public Radio choose a ...
Back in 1999 or so, I was on the team that helped Minnesota Public Radio choose a long-term storage format for their (extensive and valuable!!) audio archives, which they were about to digitize.
The conclusion we came to was that there was •no• storage medium that met their long-term preservation goals — true then, and almost certainly still true today. The best approach is perpetual and redundant forward copying of the data, from one physical storage device to another.
An archive isn’t a physical thing; it's a process.
Gizmodo asks “Will We Ever Solve the Problem of Losing Data?”
I love this answer: “I know of one data storage form that can be permanent: a library. Or rather, a world full of libraries. Libraries aren’t perfect storage devices (nothing is), but they are fiercely committed to self-repair. A good library is a collection of people, technologies, and practices that pass an obligation—to remember the things we must remember—from the last generation to the next.”
https://gizmodo.com/will-we-ever-solve-the-problem-of-losing-data-2000792386 #libraries
Published at
2026-08-06 20:04:40 UTCEvent JSON
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