Your house burns down, now what?
> I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity
That's because digital storage didn't exist then... Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Maybe I'm missing something in your argument, but to me it sounds naive?
Or maybe you're just in a nostalgic mood!
Personally, if Lloyd's of London offered an insured storage service, I might believe them, but I can't think of any other organization I would trust with a 100 year promise.
It may seem that way, but it's not as simple. A digitized history project in the UK made this assumption, and later worked really hard to get back at the data, [0] is a long description, the Wikipedia entry on the BBC Domesday book doesn't go into all the details. You might believe we've learned a lesson since then, but I don't.
DRM formats are creeping into everything. Right now it seems JPEGs will be usable forever, and that may be; But cultural artificats - games and videos - are already becoming hard to preserve; People only care about convenience, and I suspect a popular 3D-or-lightfield-or-something-format in the future will be similarly hard to preserve 20 years later.
Print media has two main advantages: It requires no equipment/software/license/electricity to use; and treated properly, it has been shown to last hundreds of years.
I have a couple of 20-year-old hard drives that are still mostly readable (12 bad sectors so far), and that's considered a miracle. Usenet history is disappearing, even though it doesn't take a lot of space - because it isn't in anyone's economic interest to keep it - and the same will happen to free cloud storage sooner or later.
Nothing stops you from having redundancy in printed media. In fact, I have that photo reproduced in another album of my relatives.
>That's because digital storage didn't exist then...
What can you realistically do to keep the digital photo through 120 years or more? Imagine you stored it on the most durable media you have, M-Disc perhaps, or whatever they advertise today. Let's assume it even survived 120 years with its data intact. Are you sure your descendants will have the means to read that M-Disc in the year 2140? How about the file system on it? JPEG or DNG format? With a printed photo, you don't have to be sure.
Online storage is much more complex and thus inherently volatile. You depend on other people and on the assumption that business and legal frameworks will remain the same throughout the archival period.
Digital tech heavily depends on an unbroken chain of content transfer, which is a pretty big assumption for archival-grade storage, considering that companies, encodings and formats come and go, and there are also things like censorship and AI "enhancement" to worry about. (and who knows what else it will be many years into future) Digital media is not static by nature. Admittedly, any media depends on content refreshing, but the traditional media has much longer life between transfers - for an extreme example we still can read Sumerian clay tablets.
>Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Storage cost was never a problem. The problem is the separation of the archival-worthy content from the info noise. Now, when the noise is multiplied, selecting is much harder than before. For my case, I only have a few photos worthy of putting into a 120-year photo album for my descendants, because I'm just an ordinary person.
It’s like the post about digitizing VHS the other day. It gets put off until the project is overwhelming.
I am in the process of scanning paper photos and photos on glass plates, dating from 120 years ago or so. Some of them survived two world wars, and mind you surviving WWII in Poland is no small feat for a piece of paper.
So while I do agree with the general sentiment of having multiple copies and backups, our digital world is woefully short-lived when compared to physical media.
On a related note, I am working on gallery/archive software, where the main assumption is longevity: whatever the UI du jour is, actual data must be kept in the simplest and most long-term file formats possible. Which means well-established and documented "traditional" image formats, text files with metadata, etc.
The odds of physical photos destroyed in a fire is far lower than a photo hosting service going out of business. There's no money in it because monitoring it for legal compliance is expensive and time consuming. Apple and Google and Facebook can do it because the monitoring has a business upside in terms of training ML models.
Physical reality is a useful abstraction.
> Your house burns down, now what?
He still has the digital copy. And perhaps physical copies that were sent to relatives.
If one has both digital and physical, then either can disappear and be recreated from the other.
