Walt Mankowski via plug on 1 Jun 2023 10:00:18 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Back Up Medium - Only 1 is 100% Reliable in 20 Years


On Thu, Jun 1, 2023, at 6:40 AM, Casey Bralla via plug wrote:
All the chatter about backups reminds me of a truism in the computer world.


What media do you use to back-up data that is 100% guaranteed to be
machine readable in 20 years, no matter what the type of data you need
to save?  [The data can be numeric, photographs, videos, etc, etc,]

The answer is not floppies, tape, HDDs, SDDs, the cloud, or USB drives. 
The answer is PAPER.

As long as a human being is capable of reading data on a piece of paper,
a computer in 2043 will have no trouble reading it either. [ Gutenberg
is feeling a little smug right now :) ]

I'm not sure I agree with that. I worked with my first OCR machine in 1985. It was impressive, but it was nowhere near 100% accurate. In 2023 the software has gotten a lot better, but it's still not perfect. Given the complexity and difficulty of the problem, I'm not convinced it will be solved in 20 years.

I do, however, think we'll be generating orders of magnitude more data in 2043 than we are today. Where are we going to get all that paper from?

Walt

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___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug