> A modern B+W film, properly fixed and washed, is essentially forever
> easily 100-200 years+
I don't understand, is it forever or 200 years?
The videos I uploaded to YouTube 10 years ago of me singing crappy songs into a webcam are plausibly going to exist until the heat death of the universe, whereas it sounds like the best case scenario for B&W film is 200 years.
> I personally started noticing bit-rot on a significant fraction of DVDs
DVDs aren't digital, they are an analog format that we use to store digital data. They are made of plastic and foil. The fact that they degrade is a shot against analog storage. Digital storage is electrical. Like S3. A good digital storage device is a living, self-repairing organism.
> The problem with digital is you then add additional tasks of loading and interpretation on top.
That's where your thinking is being constrained. You're thinking of digital archiving as something you do on top of analog media. That's backwards.
With digital, the only task is loading and interpretation. And dozens of file formats have totally stabilized. A CD packaged with an .ISO image for a Linux computer that can read it is pretty much self-hosted. You could've encoded those images 20 years ago, and they'd still be runnable on EC2 today. And they'll still be runnable on EC2 100 years from now. The fact that some very old formats are difficult to read does not mean we're going to forget how to decode ISO images, or boot Pentium-class virtual machines.
I get it that archivists are obsessed with DVDs and film, and I have a massive amount of respect for people who want to try to protect those physical objects. But the idea that preservation of digital files is somehow equivalent—or even more difficult!— is laughable.
Off topic here, but there is no such thing as the heat death of the Universe. The second princile of thermodynamics (entropy cannot decrease in a closed system) does not hold at cosmic scales. That's because that principle assumes the gravity is negligible compared to the other forces that move the molecules around, which is a perfectly valid approximation for all human-scale systems (such as engines). At cosmic scales gravity becomes dominant and the entropy of closed systems can and does spontaneously decrease. For example a giant gas cloud evolves to become a spinning disc and then a planetary system.
For sure there are cases (plenty of them) where the second principle continues to hold (entropy goes up). I was just pointing out that there are very natural example where that principle breaks down at cosmic scales. Such an example is exactly how our planetary system was born.
People know vaguely that in a few billion years our Sun will collapse and it will either become a supernova or become a star where the fusion reaction is a higher one (instead of hydrogen+hydrogen->hellium, something like hellium+hellium->carbon). At some point possibly after trillions of years, all the nuclear reaction converge to produce only iron, and from that point on there's no more fusion and fission, and later on the heat death of the universe occurs. Well, even if there are no more nuclear reactions, the universe will not die from reaching a maximum state of entropy (heat death), but may continue to evolve forever, going periodically through states of higher and lower entropy.
> easily 100-200 years+
I don't understand, is it forever or 200 years?
The videos I uploaded to YouTube 10 years ago of me singing crappy songs into a webcam are plausibly going to exist until the heat death of the universe, whereas it sounds like the best case scenario for B&W film is 200 years.
> I personally started noticing bit-rot on a significant fraction of DVDs
DVDs aren't digital, they are an analog format that we use to store digital data. They are made of plastic and foil. The fact that they degrade is a shot against analog storage. Digital storage is electrical. Like S3. A good digital storage device is a living, self-repairing organism.
> The problem with digital is you then add additional tasks of loading and interpretation on top.
That's where your thinking is being constrained. You're thinking of digital archiving as something you do on top of analog media. That's backwards.
With digital, the only task is loading and interpretation. And dozens of file formats have totally stabilized. A CD packaged with an .ISO image for a Linux computer that can read it is pretty much self-hosted. You could've encoded those images 20 years ago, and they'd still be runnable on EC2 today. And they'll still be runnable on EC2 100 years from now. The fact that some very old formats are difficult to read does not mean we're going to forget how to decode ISO images, or boot Pentium-class virtual machines.
I get it that archivists are obsessed with DVDs and film, and I have a massive amount of respect for people who want to try to protect those physical objects. But the idea that preservation of digital files is somehow equivalent—or even more difficult!— is laughable.