This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Optical disks are also pretty good too. You can even buy special ceramic ones that shouldn’t degrade over centuries or millennia.

    • Bubble Water@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      oh wow I have not heard of the ceramic ones but I do remember them having high hopes for the gold ones. now the problem is in the near future it might be harder to find machines that have cd drives