Why is digital data so fragile? | Experts Explain
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- Опубликовано: 28 авг 2024
- Memory is an essential issue for our society and for everyone one of us.
Up to now, various media have been used to store our memories and a wealth of information.
The average life expectancy of an inscription on stone is 10,000 years. On parchment: 1,000 years.
But with computers, our memory is facing an unexpected vulnerability. Some technologies have already disappeared.
Will we be able to ensure the longevity of our digital data?
Or is this data doomed to disappear, sooner or later?
Documentary: The end of Memory
Directed by: Vincent Amouroux
Production: ZED
Some years ago, the person responsible for the cover photo of Time magazine, pointed out this same issue with digital photos and how, with film becoming obsolete, we were entering an age where the long term storage of photographs has become an issue. In times past, film negatives had been found locked in cupboards or cabinets, long forgotten for decades, yet the photos were recoverable. Now, we have all our information stored in a similar way. If some global catastrophe were to happen, all our data would be easily lost, leaving future generations with the mystery of how we achieved what we did..... does this sound familiar?
@@licheong Similar to what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire,I would expect.
@@davannaleah americans are the roman empire. the mayian etc...
There is also the big issue that people have not learned sadly we are ANALOG by nature. And for visual media like pictures or film (aka moving pictures) it costs more now to do it right on actual film but for important content the simple fact is analog is vastly superior.
Case in point Sadly back in the early 90s Pink Floyd did the division bell tour.. (I saw them again then thankfully)
But they were told by people in charge of filming the concerts that they should not do the same as before with film etc butnto use the new "greatest ever cant be beat" recording to svhs equiv which like our digital is limited to X resolution.. sadly as they learned yrs later that medium cannot even be realistically upscale even with the best tech now. The info lost by not usingnanalog film is forever gone.. and that's why we cannot ever have a true proper HD version of the Pulse concert video.
Even now most filming done in digital are commonly done in 8K res. While vastly superior to what was used back in the 90s it is still LIMITED
It will never ever have more than 8K resolution of real info
However if the same movie/concert etc is filmed now on say 35mm or better that can be scanned in at 8K.. then edited etc etc and then released for consumption at 8K.. but as time goes by and say 10 yrs from now we find we ae then using say 24K as common consumer res TVs etc that 8K is still max 8k but if wanted that original analog negatives which stored properly are still pristine and can easily be scanned again at 24K. Poof 24K new uber quality..
And say 50 more years down the road the same can be done at the 1000K then used
You get the idea..
It is why many classic movies done properly on film can be remastered now at 4 or 8k from the film but a movie even aay 29yrs old done on video tape much like pulse is in many ways a disaster of disappointment
Analog esp for visual and auditory mediums as our bodies actually work in naturally (we are analog)
Stick to analog for original masters and learn from our MISTAKES!!!
@@konnorj6442 4k already blows away what most film could do. 8k is more than enough for the better film out there. The entire universe is actually made of discrete things. There aren't any half atoms out there.
We still can't definitively say how the pyramids where built.
I recently found the 16 floppy disks to old DOS games, and tried using them for nostalgia.
Dated early 1992, 31 years ago; each one read perfectly!
Wolfenstein Lives!
I still have the win3.1 installation disks..
Maybe my old 5.5” floppies can bring the Leather Goddesses of Phobos back to life.
@@dankline9162 Enjoy your game of 'solitaire'.
@@GrumpSkull
Hey, minesweeper too!
As an ex Software developer and network Admin, I keep as a minimum, 3 backup copies on separate (and ideally) different media (DVD, USB stick or SD card or removable hard drive). Oh, and I test the backups periodically to ensure they're still readable.
Blu-Ray > DVD
Irony there was HDDVD actually was superior to both dvd and Br in many ways including longevity and data security
But of course ultimately its still a multilayer optical media
@@konnorj6442 it was worse at data density
They largely focused on CDs but those seem like the cheap CDs I used to burn disc with. If I'm not mistaken the media is stored on the metallic layer (for CD R/W at least). On higher quality mass produced CDs (think records) the data resides on the plastic itself only requiring the metallic layer for reflection of laser.
@@GeoffereyEakinsTech wrong, the data on a cdr is in organic dye. Cdrws keep the data on metal, but it's more fragile due to being based on phase change.
I showed this to my class. Majority of them had no idea what a disc was and I instantly reached for my makeshift cane to deliver wisdom.
@@NerdyNEET That's next, TY!
Lmao I just recently sent my youngest to school with some old floppies some kids thought the 3.5" were decorative save buttons
And one thought the old 8" floppy was a very strange record like his great grandparents use to play that old geezer music.. when asked why he thought it was strange he said the square shape had to be an old European design from the cold war his grandparents talk about
Lol
@@konnorj6442 This had me laughing so hard.
memes? in my day we called them jokes
Why don't their parents teach them?
I remember getting into photography back in the late 00's. Right when digital photography was taking over. Well for some reason I felt the need to use film cameras. I had a set of creative photography books from the 70's made by Kodak. And I wanted to go through the learning process with film, it just felt more pure. There were still film development shops everywhere and you could get professional film cameras for very cheap. Nobody wanted them anymore.
I remember having an argument with my sister who was into digital photography. "You will end up losing your photos" I told her. "I won't, I'll always have the negatives." And I was right. I still know exactly where all of the negatives and slides of all the photos I've ever taken are. Her digital photographs are lost on some computer somewhere that hasn't been fired up in 15 years.
I'm the same. I can still pull slides from 40 years ago and they are fine to scan. Even negatives. Never lost an image yet.... Film has actually made a big comeback and even when I scan I store the scans on mediums like discs for backup so I can constantly keep them safe. I actually scanned glass plates for a mate which were 110 years old and the quality was amazing.
I have been storing my CD's under Argon for more than 20 years, ever since I realized how unstable a medium they were. These disks still appear fine and data loss is minimal.
But, of all media, hard disks stored under Argon have been the most stable of all methods I have tried.
Hard disks are now filled with helium
@@timramich but they do for reducing drag on its spinning platters and not for longevity.
@ibo beko They do it to allow the heads to ride closer to the surface, for more storage density. And you can't tell me a helium atmosphere inside then isn't a better thing for the materials in there.
@@timramich Yes, Helium is inert and blocks oxygen from its dirty deeds.
would be wise to back them up
CD was a reliable long term storage medium. Before capitalism and cheapness ruined it. Initially CD-R used gold reflective layer and single blank CD-R cost about 20USD. Then they started using silver, then aluminium coupled with even thinner recordable layer and greater recording speeds, resulting in discs that could not be read even few days after recording. Meanwhile all except one CD-R from better days in past are still perfectly fine after 20+ years.
I IMPORTED AND SSOLD THEM BACK IN 1980s I INSTALLED @GED@ TO GOVERMENT OF FRANCE.... I GOT SEVERAL ... THEY ARE GONE ... NO WAY TO READ THEM EVEN OLD XT OR AT MACHINES ... 40 YEARS HAVE PASS THEY AT SHIT
A CD that becomes unreadable after a few days seems like an unsellable product.
Cool animation with that plane wing and circuits - music matches too. And where is my beloved M-Disk (Millenniata Blu-ray disk)?
The comment about keeping not only the data on current media but the format as well is particularly important. I have documents in msword that current versions of msword cannot open. So choosing open formats where possible is also a good idea. Plain text, pdf/a, etc.
Have you tried opening those old MSWord documents in LibreOffice? It has worked for me with .doc files from 1992.
Run a virtual machine with something like windows 95 and open them in an older version of office.
Great graphics, good information. Would have liked more information on SDDs and flash drives. Also, some comments hint that DVDs are better than CDs. That wasn't covered.
Well, that wrapped up real quick at the end there... Seems like there's a lot more to actually say about this
Yes very good, but I'm ready for part 2 - How to get out of this mess :-)
@@licheong But with SSDs you have also SMART capabilities and other health parameters. You may not hear it dying, but sometimes it is a relatively slow process that you can observe. I would assume from experience that a much faster medium should also die faster. In the end, the case that a mechanical drive announces its death and lets you retrieve its data is more frequent, true, but it shouldn't be expected, since they can also die from one moment to the other. For all media since carvings in stone I would recommend a proper backup strategy 😏
@@licheong yes as bits per cell and density gos up the charge held gets smaller and more at risk of being unreadable reliably. I have read that occasionally powering them up helps the refresh but I assume this also eats into the write endurance.. so no silver bullet. So I've started to use a mix of hard & flash drives and recently M disc.
Worst part is the claim made about nand technology. That it can be safe after being written and locked away for dozens of years. That is simply untrue. Modern nand cells (TLC/QLC) will become very difficult to recover data from after several months to a year and suffer high error rates longer than that without being refreshed (copied from one cell to another).
@@pussnuts so even for a desktop that we don't use often, if we leave it unplugged for 6 months, we are in danger of it not booting and worse our data is corrupted with bit rot?
This seems much more highly produced than the 778 subs this channel has would indicate.
I think this is a ripped/bandit video. They have 10 videos and only 2 months old. I am going to report and others should also.
So, there is no security this side of the grave? Who knew?
End of history, print out a few good copies of pictures and documents and physically file them away. I still have paper copies of docs that were "before" computers. Other media such as music and video are even more of a problem.
Not "digital" is the problem. It is the density. All you need to do is hammer the bits in stone. 😂
There is actually optical media with that idea in mind that can last basically forever. Of course it requires special equipment to use but it offers far greater density than chiseling something into stone.
Something about Storage and Time
As i said once - books might outlive digital data
Who is still keeping CD's and DVD's ?
A lot of people, although digital is the main domain these days. And sure, we definitely will see more primitive methods outlast more intricate ones, especially as civilization declines to a critical point.
We've put ourselves into a position where we can easily lose important knowledge gained over the centuries and the ability to retrieve it if a global disaster were to occur.
I have CD-Rs, manufactured by Traxdata, that contain data I recorded in 1999. They are still readable.
I'd really want a digital record buried with me to last for a few hundred years. As far as I can see no digital storage will last that long! Guess I'd better be buried with my Kodachromes in an airtight box!
There are exceptions to every rule...
I have a 17 year old laptop that has files that are over 20 years old....they work like new...
Its how you take care of what you have that makes a big difference too.
but twenty years is piffling.
I am not sure if I am too concerned. Nothing lasts forever in an atrophy filled universe. People store vastly more data than they truly require with much of it being never referred to again. It comes from the perception of the ease of storage versus the difficulty of deciding what doesn’t need to be kept.
Paper was good because volume issues were the limiting factor. Retrieval is difficult as the volume of data constantly increases whilst filing protocols do not keep pace.
This is true, the medium like Compact disk or hard disk is reliable, but what good will it do if the drive that read it or the computer that drive the drive no longer available, so. I think the world need to think about this.
Whatever happened to the concept of growing pure quartz, dimond, or some other crystal; whereby the data would remain intact for several millennium ?
Yeah wasn't IBM working some crystal storage medium?
Nothing beats good old fashioned paper.
Fire
@@licheong You mean clay, they used clay tablets for most things, otherwise the scribes would not get anything done.
I found 90 year old newspaper stuffed into the wall at my house. Yes it was very readable but 100 times more fragile than toilet paper. So I read it 1 time & it turned to dust in my hand pretty much. I question paper. Stone or QR codes etched or 3d printed on plastic or something maybe 300 yrs readability.
With consumer grade media they dont know/care who the consumer is so they just try to make it last max 1 lifetime.
✂️>📜
You guys must have never heard of M-disc. They are CDs designed specifically for archival storage with a lifespan of 1000 years. High capacity too. Someone made a whole ass documentary without googling "archival CD".
i have some cdrs i 'burned' in the mid 2000s still perfectly ok, but then i have a mass produced stamped audio cd that 'rotted'
The opposite issue is even more often discussed, i.e. is that digital files can't be got rid of anymore - digit data persists forever. Given the gigantic amount of information being created now vs pre the digital age, even if 99% gets lost there could easily be millions of times more left than is left on paper from 100 years ago, and trillions of trillions of times more left than is left on stone tablets from 2000 yrs ago. The thing about digital stuff is that it can be copied without loss, and is normally copied many times. The result is that while some media could be fragile digital data isn't fragile at all.
i wonder how this will change when quantum is used for long term storage and we rely on it?
The problem is that with current technology 100% is going to be lost. Including that previous sentence.
Have you heard about data rotting ?
@@icraftcrafts8685 the same, you can't stop data rotting because you can't stop the Time
@EnterpriseTNG You can stop data rot zfs array, zfs scrubs, 3-2-1 backup, hashes of all the files and you can skip the rot
This doesn't seem to be an issue for me. My first crude xxxMB and xGB HDDs were doomed to fail by the time I received them. My xxGB IDE HDDs still work fine but I don't have anything old enough to interface them save for maybe a Pentium 4 system somewhere. This interface problem means limited or no access. Since SATA first appeared, it became clear that SATA is here to stay and maybe it will be obsoleted by SAS in the next 20 years but there is one greater champion to guarantee interface and that is USB. USB is eternal, wanting and without end. Moving on to the data itself, I never write backups but do keep checksums on very LARGE and important sets of data. Every 5-10 years I simply pick up a new disk and migrate the data over to that new volume and continue using the older disks until they either die or outlive their purpose.
In the past 20 years I've gone from 80GB IDE to 300GB SATA. From there 750GB, 2TB, 4.9TB and now 16TB. That's a pretty big push for just one guy and I'm painfully aware of addictions related to this field that attracts a phenomenon like data hoarding. So far, all storage mediums have proven to be as garbage and prone to bit rot as those CDs. Despite this, they all have one solid trick and that's ubiquity. They don't need to hoard their data all in one spot. It needs to be shared as a means of defeating extinction. That's GG. Problem solved.
Ide to usb adapters can be had pretty cheap now (under 10 bux) so accessing older ide drives is easy so long as the drive is in good working order if it is not or even suspect if such do NOT try using the usb adapter)
@@konnorj6442 Can you elaborate on why not to use a USB adapter if the drive is suspected to have problems? Would that somehow damage the drive even more? Would that damage not occur if the drive were connected to a computer's internal IDE port?
@@DouglasKaden If the HDD is even suspected to have damage, the correct step to take is to have speciality data retrieval as normal operation (regardless if through IDE-ports or USB) might cause catastrophic damage.
Anyone have thoughts on “M-Disc” archival CDs that claim to use a “stone-like” substrate? They claim extremely long life.
My understanding is that they are extremely reliable
Data that is stored holographically could probably last forever as long as the storage medium is solid state and made of diamond.
Holocron? :D
@@ecognitio9605 something like that perhaps.
And has lots of ecc bits.
RAID-10 & Tapes are your best friends for now. Had multiple HD's failed over the years but RAID-10 - ALWAYS - come through - as good as they come. And tapes? It is the the closest thing we have for now for the *MOST* reliable data backup and nothing on the horizon can come even close. Not even virus/malware can hurt tape backup as they're "trapped" like a tree sap until "released" to HDD. All SD/HDD will die mechanically and data corruption WILL occur as it's only a matter of time. But tapes? Put those puppy in an airtight container and it will most likely OUTLAST your life!
Great. That means assuming a really healthy life with really good genes probably maxes out at about 140 years.
Apart for mechanical spooling damage and flaking of the ferrous coating on the tape, very common occurrence. It cusses irretrievable data losses.
That's my kinda thinking!! I was literally just wondering about tape ... it's a beautiful medium for sound, and apparently data archival too. Right on.
@@4wheelwarrior The people who don't use tapes don't understand it. If left purely for archival purposes (not constant accessing like HDD) they will EASILY outlast your lifetime. They can also be indexed very easily. The latest LTO's are nearly indestructible with multiple redundancy and error checking built-in. Expensive? Yes. but as bullet proof as they come.
@@lil----lil Actually, looking on eBay, seems LTO 1 and 2 drives are quite INexpensive ... Still look dang useful at 100-200GB a tape, too. Rather archive to 5 tapes than a terabyte HDD!
For now on I'm going to scribe all my data into stone so it will last 10000 years
There should be more distinction here between professionally pressed CDs and recordable CDs. Recordable CDs are known to have data deterioration within a short number of years, but what about professionally pressed CDs? I would think they could theoretically last as long as the plastic they are made of.
You need to watch again and pay attention
I changed the 1,000 hour light bulbs in my house for 10,000 hour compact fluorescents. No prizes to guess which lasted longest!
Love the subtle screen transition from 1:17-1:41
Countless articles lied to us about life expectancy of celluloid tape. I have audio cassettes fifty years old that play just fine. 35 year old VHS tapes as well. Kept safe, they will probably last for hundreds of years.
I started backing up data on CD's in 1999. I noticed the particles on a few that destroyed the data. I started taking the old data disks and put them on hard drives. I was an early adopter of digital audio recording and one thing I learned is if your data is not copied three times and one copy stored off site you will eventually will lose it. SSD's and HDD's are no different and I would like to suggest both of those are more fragile than a CD or DVD.
N + 2 + 1 is good practice for normal required use.
N = every device you have, holding the data.
2 = a two drives in RAID that secures from hardware malfunction in either one for quick reaction, or if any device is lost. Not in same location as your devices.
1 = a drive in off-site in physically secure location so if RAID is lost, then you get backup to your devices.
And then most importantly, have a funds to copy data to new hardware when technology changes, or when requiring larger space. So if buying a new HDD, then it gets filled with old HDD and then you need more space. So if old disk is 2 Terabytes, then you get 4 Terabytes, now you have only 2 terabytes free. And the data in the old drives is put a side in permanent storage.
When hardware changes, like when it did with IDE/PATA -> SATA, you need to buy new hardware to copy data and take it in use, as you can't anymore trust for old legacy connectors to stay usable for long. I have many 2.5" and 3.5" HDD with PATA connection that were accessible at the time easily, but now if I would need to get a PATA connection, it would be already difficult (even when you can buy from ebay lot of varius USB adapters).
The 3.5" floppy disk is gone, even with USB drives. You can get the hardware but software is difficult really.
5¼" floppy disks is seriously problematic. Lot of data in those, and you can't have a USB drive to read it mechanically, and software is almost completely gone.
C-tapes is already challenging, but doable but audio not possible get in good digital form if you can't find some device with optical output, and data stored in C casettes is simply gone without that era computers.
One really important thing is to store the old devices as well. And check periodically that they work. As data recovery can be very challenging stuff to do if something important is not possible be converted to new formats and devices.
6:35 Take that, Apple! Even the HDD has headphone jacks.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I would say
Tape > dvd /cd > bdr >ssd=hdd
Ignore the cost
Tape is the best of coz
But i found dvd/cd is much better for backup than hdd
1. Once you burnt, data would be remove (easily)
2. Better drop protection than hdd
The reason why i have opinion 1, is because i just restore my old photo from cd backup in 2001😂
Of coz humidity can kill them all
But now i kept 3 media backup
Ssd/hdd +bdr. Why i prefer cd dvd than bdr is
Bdr XL burner is rare to get
First three rules of computing:
1) backup
2) backup
3) backup
Fourth rule of computing:
4) don't do the first 3 and find out the hard way.
Beautifully made video.
With increased storage density we will just migrate data from one form into the other The newer forms will take up much less space and if material science continues to develop, the media will be much more durable.
For solid state memory the read cycles are MUUUUUUCCH higher than the write cycles.
The core issue here is not as much the technologies involved in storing the data and the information but that all these mediums and the reading technology depend on electrical power. If by some catastrophy power generation is no longer possible everything stored digitally is completely lost.
I store all my hard drives under water so I have no fear of dust. I'm confident
that when I need the data backed up on them dust will not be an issue. "0_o"
SSD are vulnerable to micro electrostatic charge
...and bit-rot as has been recently discovered, if they don't pretty often see power.
@@NerdyNEET No, a read cycle; write cycles are destructive in SSDs.
When you understand that all matter is simply vibrating atoms. you know no matter can ever remain unchanged, and thus "last" forever. In fact, everything is changing in every moment, albeit at extremely differing paces. Sometimes we forget that just because the pace of change of a particular object is so infinitesimal that humans cannot perceive it in real time, that doesn't mean it is not changing "before our very eyes", so to speak ;)
These are CD recordable. pressed CDs like your original music CDs will last many decades...but like any media, it won’t last forever. Data will always need to be transferred to the latest and greatest.
Contant Backupping and testing for midterm-solution.
Minerals and crystals for longterm storage (like 100s and 100s of years)
Amazingly,
The HDD in my 1997 PowerBook 1400 still works, barely any if at all any noticeable occasional click sounds, though, my other PB did finally go bad, but, it proves that FAR BEYOND 5 years is possible.
In the segment about CDs, the researcher is doing studies on CD-R discs, yet the narrator is talking as if this applies to regular CDs. There's a huge difference in their longevity.
Interesting that you list the name of documentary, the director and the production team but not the year... ~2015
The title makes no sense. Digital data is actually infinitely more robust than analog data, which cannot be verified at all. One can simply build a checksum over digital data or run recovery operations (e.g. using RAID on HDD level). No such thing is possible for analog data. Therefore, I am very confused by the video's title...
Or maybe the question was really why some storage media or so fragile? I could use 1 thousand metric ton heavy stones as 1s and empty areas for zeros - this would be an insanely wasteful but insanely robust storage media for digital data, showing that it is not the digital data which is fragile, but at best the storage media.
However, the analogue information on a vinyl disc does not need complicated decoding systems to read it in any situation. During the 1970's and '80's, music recording studios saw that they could record the music as digital on magnetic tape. Seemed terrific as there was no problem with signal to noise ratios, wow and flutter or frequency range.
However, all magnetic recordings are degraded by the continual ebb and flow of the magnetic field of the planet. Even moving it from room to room changes the background field.
By the early 2000's when the engineers reached for the tapes, the analogue copies were still readable and able to be understood and re-engineered to close to original. The digital signals had faded into the back ground such that it was difficult to separate "fact" from "fiction" in the noise from the tape.
It is also easier to build a new analogue tape play back machine than a digital one. The hardware maybe the deciding factor.
Lol, real robot take right here.
Digital data requires perfection, a single bitflip and the file is done. Very fragile.
Analog doesn't need to be perfect, as its a facimily of the real world. Even at 50% signal, you could still get a recognizable picture on analog television, now I can't even get reception.
Back up all the time.
The "internet never forgets" because data is stored in redundant places in the cloud. It is true that one medium will not last forever, but if you store in the the cloud, you should never lose it as data is automatically copied and then recreated on new drives once drives start to fail. All of this happens automatically. But, if you store stuff yourself you probably don't keep multiple copies, so you may lose it as nothings lasts forever. That's why your best bet is to back up your data in the cloud.
I'm looking at old posts on old sites and all pictures from external hosting are lost. Some of the hostings simply closed, some of the hostings cleared the place of unclaimed images. Video links disappear because the associated video hosting account has been banned or deleted. Many links lead nowhere, because there is no longer a site, comment, page, file. So the internet forgets.
You can't trust the cloud at all.
The Internet was designed to withstand the nuclear strike. It was the DARPANET for the government and military.
It reformed itself to become as Internet. And it was promoted that no country can control it so that they can stop other countries accessing internet by economical or physical means as by war.
But in 2010 or so a Swedish study was made and it was found that almost whole internet can be taken down by striking to 3-5 strategical places depending where you want to do it. There were dozens of key locations where it can be done. And if a single nation is wanted to be out, it can be done far easier if you surround it. The most protected network in the world is in the Russia. Its 11 time zones made it capable have access to far more other routes than example USA has, that is far second. Few critical nodes and you can get USA out of Internet, isolated to own nation wide network.
Your data is even less than that. The data doesn't go randomly all around, it doesn't get backed up multiple times all over places. Likelyhood is that your data is sitting in a two separate HDD in the same server rack or even just on server next to it.
Example if I upload something to Google drive, it doesn't get further from my location than just 30 km, because that is the closest Google server farm in hundreds of kilometers. The data in there is saved to 2 or 3 different HDD. Parity is made to be in two different servers, but it likely is in just same server road in the building. Is it likely that both of those gets destroyed, or devices gets damaged at the same time? No... But there is no such thing as impossibility.
The data is as safe as it is if I would run a RAID at the home. By standpoint of mechanical failure in one HDD. As if I then immediately swap new HDD in and copy data to get backup done from the original, then I am fine for a moment. But I am not safe for burglar, home invasion, fire, or most likely, human error of deleting data.
If I am smart, I will write the data on three HDD (1, 2 and 3), I will have disks 1 and 2 as a RAID, and then I will have disk 3 moved to off-site to secure location by physical access.
And I will have the RAID to be synced to disk 3 periodically over night, once a week at least. In critical times it would need to happen every day. And the sync happens only to changes, and they are kept in 2-3 previous versions. So at any given time I can get 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks backwards.
This is not a problematic thing to be done over normal internet connection (1-5 Mbits) if I can maintain data size relatively small (lets say 1-10 GB per day) but anything bigger than that and it becomes bottleneck by connection depending how much.
That gives full backup to system. As you always have your devices itself that maintains primary version of the file, the 1&2 holds the secondary version in fast network, and 3 holds backup of original files.
And only you have access to the files, by any means required really as you have physical access in a day to it even.
Only soyboys use cloud.
NAS and BluRay are far superior.
I would not rely on those fancy clouds, they are in general just as vulnerable as FTP or any other data access systems.
As said by einsamaberfrei, from the moment you lose access to the cloud or any other subscription based data pool, you lose access to your data stored there, as it were gone. In case of major disruptions of the internet, which we luckily haven't had for now, despite all those redundancies, there could be huge data losses. I don't mean the apocalypse for us like nukes everywhere. It could be as simple as a controller chip that is part of 90% of all hard drives but somehow can be remotely shut down or defunct by a special data sequence passing through. I doubt that datacenters or server farms are checking their hardware meticulously for any similar vulnerabilities. The Intel Meltdown and Spectre disaster should remind us that there could be waiting a ton of such (even known) doors for exploits on any hard- or software.
Yeah makes sense that the increased complexity that makes digital data so convenient also makes it so fragile. A reasonable strat for the average person would be to keep it all on some hard/solid state drives using ZFS and migrate to new drives every 10 years or so.
Now imagine the modern techno dictatorship through the globalist modern connected multinational State when facing a new Carrington Event...
if your doing cold storage on ssd - that is to have unplug the ssd and leave it for months, you may suffer from data corruption. The data is only "solidly" stored if the device recieves power at regular intervals.
since pc's do not use error correcting code. every time you move something you introduce more error!
@@Number6_ They do if you tell them to via hardware and software, which is what I suggested. On top of ZFS you could use ECC RAM for another layer of correction.
Yes previously man remembers many thing but now very less remembered
If we fall now, we would be an archaeological dead zone. The record just.... stopped as far as a future would be concerned
Nice info, thank you for sharing it :)
I clearly remember this news show on the French A2 channel. By the time there was an uproar of the vinyl fans, discussing how the compression was horrendous, and so on. They soon replace my cassettes collection. Then my music moves to a hard-drive, then to USB keys. Now all my music is on a SSD and on a SD-Card. Yet, I have a dozen of IDE hard drives for which I have no mean to access anymore. I forgot to transfer their content to SATA hard drives. Not much on them I guess, but they are time capsules of decades passed.
Literally my problem. The m-disc hype died and we don’t have anything that stores data for long time. Add to that planned obsolescence…
cd-r's can peel apart, always the weakest of the optical media.
Blu Ray has M Discs which basically means the data should last a Millennium ie 1000 years
CDs were supposed to last 100years
@@daviddunkelheit9952 My CDs purchased 40 years ago are perfectly fine. Don't believe the FUD. One thing this poorly informed video did not mention is the built-in error-correction of CDs which overcomes minor errors. M-disks were engineered to last for centuries and I have no reason not to believe the manufacturer's claims, especially after how my collection of hundreds of CDs has lasted faultlessly for decades.
@@paulcarter7445 there is a distinct difference between CD and CD-R and CD-RW accessible by the consumer. I could take a cheap bargain bin CD from Rhino records or Ktel that I bought for a dollar and skip it across the parking lot and it would play while you could scratch top of a CDR (reflective part) or wipe some dust off the bottom of it and that would cause it to skip or throw read errors. Worse than that in the tropics there is a bacteria that will eat the substrate like a bore 🪱 and make it unreadable. Then there is the problem if the inner most part of the disc is damaged then the CD is useless and can’t be recovered using ISObuster or CDroller (which recovers binary data by rescanning or replacing blocks). Consumers don’t have access to the high quality media used by music publishers and therefore don’t have anything that will even last a year. That’s why there was such a fast adoption of using USB keys for installing OS such as Ventoy and Rufus. These programs emulate CD/DVD iso images for the purpose of booting and running a Live OS. Because CD/DVD are so unreliable.
@@daviddunkelheit9952 Yep! Agreed!
You will have to check in 1000 years.
The biggest issue is that nobody uses them, and we don't even have readers anymore
I suggest we copy those binary data onto a stone tablet.
Just backup your data to new HDD/SSD every 10 years, they are going cheaper after all. I still have "My Documents" folder and its contents from Windows 95, Now I'm using Windows 11.
mDiscs have achieved long term success
Paper tapes, the kind used to store teletype messages in a 5 bit Baudot format, can store text for hundreds of years. In the end, it has the same lifespan of books...
scary, but nothing i didn't already know, what's the take away, backing everything up to cuniform tablets?
I did forget to ask, what about Bluray Discs? They make recordable media, too. Are they just as bad?
I have been using BDR for 10 yrs now. The manufacturing process WAS better until companies got cheap & start using the cd process ON the BDR media. I cant speak for the reliability of this newer bdr process. Overall BDR tends to coaster out on the burner or be reliable. But when a DISK DOES fail youve just lost 50-100X more data. So its catastrophic either way.
My playstation 1 cd's are still working. i would probably clean the cd's a bit more just to be a bit more safe. but i have had a lot more failures on the home burned cds than the cd's that are bought with games , movies or music on it
I just memorize the binary code of all my saved data
Entropy will always increase with time - 2nd law of thermodynamics and the reason of a ever changing universe - This might also be the answer to the fermi paradox.
Some Standards Committee must decide on a common storage format, and everyone has to commit to hold on to it for a thousand years or so.
In the last decades, the evolution of storage formats has been chaotic for two reasons: the proprietary formats, and the rapid increase in media storage sizes.
Sony has been at front in creating strange proprietary formats (recall the memory sticks?), but later a wiser man decided that micro-SD and USB thumb drives were the future for everyone worldwide.
The memory size moved from 360 Kbytes floppy disks, to 10 Terabyte hard drives and 2 Terabytes USB drives today, and it is still increasing. Now it could be possible to decide about an universal storage format (say, an 8 or 16 Terabytes USB stick; and start developing the Millenium Edition of this universal format, able to store data for one thousand years. This format will be the one that we will pass on to the future generations.
Of course we must commit to keep the reader available forever - similarly to what we did involuntarily with the LP records and with the musicassettes - proper readers are still on sale 75 years after the format begun to be sold...
So THIS is what happened in ancient Egypt. Someone forgot to backup the pyramid blueprints.
They used the son, father, grandfather system.
But they all died 4000 years ago.
Regarding SSD's , I've had more failures than with hard drives, so far never in 23 years have never had a mechanical drive fail.
They start out talking about pressed CDs and suddenly start talking about writable CDs. These are two completely different technologies! Pressed CDs do not degrade.
In Hawaii there is a bacteria that eats the substrate and looks like bore worms. Destroys the CD readability
The fact that anybody thought disks would last a hundred years in the first place is laughable if they got any use and everyone knows library and video stores were the worse because they were handled so frequently. One of the main reasons to rip a CD would be to put the original somewhere safe so you didn't mind if the in use one got scratched.
I have CDs that are 20 years old, and I'm afraid to put them in my optical drive out of fear that they will explode (due to centrifugal force). Some of them have cracked and are clearly no longer usable. I still use DVDs even today for archival backups, but I don't think I'm going to be able to do so for much longer.
cracked cds will be ok in audio cd players as they spin fairly slow, but not a good idea to use cracked ones in computer drives unless you can force drive speed slower
There are no read cycle limitations on USB flash memory. There is just write cycle limitations. Once write cycle limits have been reached, the drive becomes READ ONLY. And why age CDs in 2023? Why not get some of those millions of free AOL CDs sent out in the 90s' aging in real-world scenarios (not simulated) and see how may have data loss 25+ years later? Common sense?
1:26 These are the only messages that our computers know how to interpret
NO !! (as an expert myself) i can conclusively tell you that machine code is very commonly written in Hex.
and if you're going to argue that the hex gets translated back to binary... it doesn't !
if a CPU is written NATIVELY in Hex then the Hex is the Native Machine code
so... that statement is not true
Vertium Azo cds and dvds, they quote the life is 100 years
I disagree about vinyl I have vinyls from 1920-till recent even say 40s 50s 60s 70s 80s they still good
Cd was sensitive to humidity and mold
6:30 Wait WHAT? Moment earlier it was claimed 85% of CD can keep data for more than 20 years he couldn't tell how long all he could say - it survived. So typical for what is now called "science". Data shows most of mediums are still perfectly fine. Show me FLASH or HDD or tape made these days capable od doing it for that long. Flash uses 4,8 levels of voltage to represend 2,3 bits at once it loses data just don't know yet. As example how it works - i noticed issues with DDR RAM modules not because DRAM was broken but SPD data on this tiny chip that holds parameters. On one PC was readable on other not. Two of 4 modules made in 2007 never booted, other 2 made in 2008 sometimes, sometimes not, same exact manufatrurer model purchased at same time by previous owner. Knowing what could been damaged - NAND Flash i reprogrammed it with SPDTool on other machine without any modification and it worked flawlesly. This happened during winter PC was exposed to extreme cold. Had simmilar issues to boot 2005+ made PC's yet i had never such issues to PC made in 90s. Nor to any CD-ROM. I had tough issues with quite modern DVD's and Flash BIOSes
I instantly knew what was cause. That is example of 20 years old flash storage medium already loosing data. BIOS, firmware, of most of 2000+ devices. No longer hard-wired logic but all programable. Be aware! Update BIOS before it's too late. Even HDD drives even if platern and head will be fine, even it holds its firmware in FLASH memory! It can stop working after 20 years if it's made in early 2000s.
Beware or modern types of memory. CD in comparison is not that bad 30 years old disks are still perfectly fine! Same with old HDDs some hardwired GAL PROM technology (bit's are burnt forever)
In old days these flash memories stored 1 bit / cell, as 2 states, 0 or 1es. Now days much smaller cell, leaking as much as old one, stores multiple level of voltage interpreted as 2,4 bits at once. Wont be able to retain information as long as 15% of CDs guy tested. But because it's still in use nobody yet noticed that much. I have no issues with old HDD, BIOSes yet newest ones do have broken sectors problems to boot machines that are 20 years old. None of such problemm i had with machines older than that. Some 35 years old. No issues with CD-ROM. Lot of issues with DVDs. What other type of data storage you ment as comparison to CD? All CD and had written many in 2000s all still held data despite fact so much people claim - it wont be possible at all. I almost believed CD are bad. Had to throw away CD-ROM devices cause laser degraded with time, that is issue. Not medium but devices.
The best archival media are vinyl records, but they are analogue...
i have working cds from 1999 and use ISO Buster to retrieve difficult data
CD-R and CD-RW seem to be a good enough medium. I have stuff on them that has been written in 1998 and such. They are still readable.
I have some Kodak CD-R that uses a silver gold alloy for the reflector instead of aluminium. It is probably better to use pure gold.
DVD-R seems to be very unreliable. Some discs are completely unreadable after 1 y.
Sometimes, a bunch of file are readable but 1 or 2 files can’t be read and Linux says CRC error.
I have tried to read them using multiple DVD drives.
I just have TV shows and movies on them so no big deal.
I prefer HDD now. I keep multiple HDD as a backup.
this is why the DMCA is flawed in its implemtation and requiring the need for usage rights to be clearly labled and allowing media to be coppied and stored in alterntive and long term manners also giving protection to archiving companies such we see in video games & ROMS
i miss cd\dvd as a media storage, it is focorse to smaal now, but having a uncangable storage that canot be corupted, infested or changed is a safer option for sure, if it is well made it can last a long time, at the end dvd-r was just crap records, because it was not well made.
What about uploading important photos to a site like dropbox where they are stored on a secure server? As long as the servers keep running and we never get an emp attack from an enemy of ours, your digital photos should be safe.
Data is like conversations that people have had throughout history. Most of them are fleeting. It has only been possible to do audio recordings of human speech for about a century, before that conversations were only transcribed and they were usually in an official capacity, court recordings, discussions in parliaments, business meetings, etc. We don’t know what our ancestors discussed in private. Just like our descendants won’t see our Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram pictures and TikTok videos. Good riddance!
I have a vinyl record over 50yr old and it still plays like the day I bought it so what's he meaning?
He's saying that after 50 years, there is a significant possibility of damage to the information printed on the disc as the support wears out. This, of course, depends on various factors such as the quality of materials, usage, storage conditions, etc. If your vinyl still sounds awesome like the day you got it, you're doing a solid job taking care of it! 🎶✨
Inscribe everything on gold?
I remember the time when news of recordable CDs were rotting came up. DVDs probably were a little more tolerant, but probably still had rot. Tape and physical drives have limitations, too. Online storage seems like a good option, right?
All the CD-Rs I burnt when a student 25 years ago are now unreadable 😢 Data loss is a serious problem, and everything is in the cloud now - if the main data centres get wiped out or disconnected then so goes 99% of our modern knowledge!
@@NerdyNEET I know that, the data is actually on servers in their data centers, and can be redundant.
@@bigjd2k quite a few data centers I have dealt with use redundancy across locations around the globe. Chances of all those locations going down at the same exact time are slim.
The good thing about Cloud storage is that all this is somebody else's problem, and most of the time they have very high security, and very high redundancy.
The bad thing about Cloud storage is:
A/ You never know for sure how your data is really being stored. At least not in most consumer applications (professional applications such as AWS and Azure allow you to specify fairly comprehensively).
B/ You're whistling to the tune of whoever your data is with. They aren't invulnerable, and something might happen to Cloud providers, no matter how big or small. Something might even happen to the internet. If either an individual company breaks down, or there is a big disruption to the digital ecosystem, it's gone.
Best answer is to use both - have large redundant storage at home (such as a NAS, or ideally a PC with data manually backed up from one hard disk to another), and a backup to a reputable cloud service provider.
@@NerdyNEET Thank you. That's why I would NEVER use the cloud. I don't trust someone else.
What about tape drives?
30 years in ideal conditions.
I have 1995 hdd IDE that I can still read. I have some VCD on some really good writeable CD that mold doesn't eat. Some of my burnt CDs died because microscopic animals eat it. Some of my pressed CDs are so scratch up, that I might can save them with some glue or polish. Those films and HDD last at least since 1995 to now. I bought a ssd in 2011. It died in 2014. SSD transistors lose their charge and die. Always archive to [magnetic tape]||rust which is a HDD or film.
flash drive or ssd drive is even worst. those m.2 has high failure rates due ro heat. they are more exposed to heat than ssd drive becsuse they run at higher speed. ssd drive runs at 500mb read write usually, the m.2 goes up to 7000mb per second. So the heat is higher. usually you are looking at failure rate within 2 years
Phew. Thank goodness we invented flash drives.
Oh wait.