I don’t understand why people say this. Digital formats can be easily ported over to other digital formats and the more we can automate, the easier it’ll be to port digital information from one format to another. I don’t think we’ll lose very much data at all.
Preserving digital data requires constant maintenance, because none of the media we use will last forever. Any maintenance gap of a few decades means the data is lost. Such gaps are inevitable over longer timescales like thousands of years.
Preserving analog data also requires maintenance, except digital maintenance is much easier to do and can be, at least partially, automated, while analog maintenance is specialty work that can’t be automated at all.
Digital data still requires hardware that needs maintenance. Besides what is going to be archived over time will be things people consider significant in some way, not joe shmoes harddrive.
What I was pointing out was that you can actually see the fact that the hard drives are designed to be replaced as a positive rather than a negative. It means that the data can be moved from drive to drive without much hassle.
> Preserving digital data requires constant maintenance, because none of the media we use will last forever
That's the only reason we have any texts written by Greek and Romans constant maintenance and copying, and that's also why almost everything has been lost over the ages. Clay tablets from the bronze age are an aberration.
Unless civilization is destroyed after a nuclear war, solar event, something else. Knowledge could be lost in a handful of generations. Maybe a global pandemic makes everyone have constant debilitating brain fog and everything just stops working. I think the right actor in the right place could make these things (except the solar thing) happen.
Although a good point to consider is that we have lost the vast majority of information about the past, so it's not like the old way of writing stone tablets or whatever is necessarily good.
LOL, the whole of most of the pre-Facebook social networks has already been lost. And that was where most people were keeping their digital photos from 2000-2008.
