Comment by nknight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nknight | Hacker News Reader

Sigh This again? Seems like the press does this story once a month.

"If you don’t have a copy of WordPerfect 2 around, you’re out of luck."

Dunno about WP2, but my copy of LibreOffice purports to open WordPerfect files of indeterminate vintage, and there are various other formats in there that I know go back 20+ years, and I'll be very surprised if ODF 1.0 readers disappear between now and eternity.

And of course, for us English-only types, plain ASCII files work as well now as they did in the 60s. I expect UTF-8 will likewise work at least as well in 2050 as it does now.

Physical media degradation/obsolescence is the only thing I would worry about, and then not that much for anything that's already been brought into the Internet age.

Storing lossless encodings of every film ever made might be a challenge, but text? No. A little care is all it takes, and I do mean a little.

While the media may do stories like this often, I feel like the question is often more along the lines of "how do we save all of the bits!?" and less about other, broader ways we can think about saving the information, as opposed to just saving the data.

For me, the more relevant part of this story was:

"By some estimates, that’s nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Even if we had perfectly stable storage, could we ever have enough to preserve everything? The short answer is no — but only because we’re trying to replicate the practices used for decades to maintain paper archives."

Right, as long as you store it in a format that you choose for compatibility then text will be fine on that front. Even if you don't have a proper ODF reader it's still a zip archive with text files inside. And UTF-8 is easy to decode.

The problem as I see it is defending from two possible problems at the same time: having the media fail, and being hacked. Some kind of internet-based storage is great for the former, lousy for the latter. But with a bit of effort you can combine online distributed storage with a closet or two full of hard drives and tapes.

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