I've been thinking a lot lately about all the things that have been created in the digital age -- all the videos on YouTube, as a single example -- and how fragile it all seems. Imagine if we were to "lose" the internet, in that every bit of data on it, every site, every image, every video, etc. were to vanish, what would we do?
It's not like you can just print out a podcast or a video, and with the move away from the written word as a method of data exchange online this seems even more unlikely to be saved since no one is transcribing anything.
We keep talking about the coming collapse of society, what what will happen to all this information at the other end if high-speed internet takes many years to return? What if it never returns? And no one seems to be making any attempt to even think about what would happen to all this information without the internet as it now is.
In the past everything was written down in the real world, transcripts written constantly, and thousands of pages of paper are thrown into vaults with hundreds of years of records, but what about all this digital data that requires powerful (compared to even 10 years ago) computers and supported software to even be viewed?
TL;DR: what can be done about the transience of the digital world?
Upload it on archive.org Download the pages and the videos Take screen captures Always back-up your hard-drive. Back-up your back-up hard-drive too, just to be sure.
On this subject : will Encyclopedia Dramatica ever become great again ?
Ian Gray
Yes, but I'm talking about further into the future, in a moment of major decline. Saying "back it up" doesn't really deal with the issue of the machine to read/access the data itself isn't online/powered.
Adrian Rivera
>Because electricity cannot be generated manually with relative ease by a freshman-level engineer
You are paranoiac
Joseph Campbell
Will hard drives or DVDs last longer when placed in a vault? Couldn't hurt to leave paper instructions on how to maintain it, generate electricity, etc.
Put the most important text on paper or even non-rusting metal/stone. Videos music etc might be gone for good unless someone figures out a better method.
Justin Powell
Not really, they are going to degrade eventually and the information will be corrupted beyond retrieval. Look up bit root for more info.
Angel Adams
Music can be stored non-digitally. See records, cassettes, music boxes, sheet music, etc.
Everyone ITT seems to think that the biggest problem is data storage, when the real problem is interpretation. Whether "interpretation" refers to languages, writing, audio/video codecs, or the type of machine required to read media, data is worth nothing without a way to drive meaning from it.
We can align every star in the universe to spell out "Jews did 9/11", so that the message remains visible to everyone until the universe's last star dies out, but it won't mean shit if our descendants can't read it.
Joshua Turner
>Imagine if we were to "lose" the internet, in that every bit of data on it, every site, every image, every video, etc. were to vanish, what would we do?
party pretty hard, get drunk, get laid, be thankful that bullshit is over, complain about the arrival of the next wave of bullshit
Jordan Bailey
Yes, but the information would be easily spread because you'd essentially be bodging it. And such a method of electrical generation would not be as widespread as it currently is now.
>Will hard drives or DVDs last longer when placed in a vault? Apparently blu-ray discs will last 100 years, but they also said the same about floppy discs. SSDs will lose data if they're not powered on for long periods and HDDs can seize up with age.
And modern paper will last a long time because white paper now has bleach in it, so as long as its stored in a dry place it'll last pretty well, or well enough that it could be copied in that time.
> Videos music etc might be gone for good unless someone figures out a better method.
The problem is really that so much of modern media of all kinds is mostly visuals and sound, and then there's the trouble with file formats. Remember that case where loads of NASA images were un-openable because no one had a very specific computer with a specific program?
Levi Rivera
Cassettes are still digital, right?
And as for interpretation, (I covered the access of data) languages don't die out absolutely to the point of being unreadable for hundreds of years. Even if every English speaker died today, we'd still be able to assemble the language in some form from leftover dictionaries and comparing to other languages.
Ayden Morris
Well, nothing of value would be lost to start with so why the panic?
Landon Campbell
Is that really for us to decide? Besides, if it's all worthless, why invest so much time and so many resources to it? Something like 15-20% of the electrical supply goes to the internet and associated technologies, so it has to be worth something.
Easton Kelly
Tell me, what's worth saving exactly?
Alexander Bailey
Surely as much as we can? Who knows what could be important later, even just culturally. It's why people were so happy to find these tapes, that held 10 years if USENET.
Imagine, 20 years after it passed into obscurity and vanished, someone just turns up and says "I have 10 years of Facebook chatlogs".
It's the same reason that the GeoCities archive is still so heavily seeded.
Daniel Reyes
I guess we could save all our historical records and technical information (all types of engines, mechanical designs, electrical designs for computer chips & transistors etc), so that we don't enter another dark ages type scenario
Bentley Walker
Also Wikipedia, I think it would be great to have a backup of something so wide-ranging, as it has so much data about pretty much everything
Brayden Davis
You can download a torrent of wikipedia as-is. I think it's a few GB.
Jaxson Wilson
The end of the Internet would be the best thing to ever happen to hummanity.
Eli Ortiz
I don't think you can say that. Compare how easy it is to get information and access to books now. And the exchanging of that information. I admit that the internet has taken on a runaway-train life of its own, but surely even as a method of discussion and document exchange it has some value?
It's for that that people put up with horrifically slow BBSs.
Adam Fisher
Who cares? Like 99.99% or more in the web is useless trash. Everything of importance, like scientific papers, is still printed
Asher King
Ok so I looked into it, apparently the best long term storage so far is the M-Disc, which came out in 2009. Looks good for small file storage IMHO
as an It guy, its all about BACKUPS at home i have a big safe with a hard drive in it and backup my redundant systems to the safe.
Parker Watson
...
Tyler Diaz
>Irving said, >>It’s quite an unusual feeling looking at the original Nazi microfiche glass plates in the original Agfa boxes—there are eighteen hundred plates, each with 25 or 40 images on them—a total of 70 or 80 thousand pages of paper. And you know you are the first person to read them since Goebbels, in 1944 and 1945, ordered the stuff to be preserved in case of damage to the originals. No one knows now where his original notebooks are, or what happened to them. They’re probably gone forever. But fortunately they were preserved on glass plates, and I was the first person to study them.
>Incredible as it seems, had Goebbels not taken the precaution of copying his diary onto newly-invented microfiche and burying it, it would have been permanently lost.
Thomas Taylor
helium filled hard drives, in a airtight case inside a Faraday cage!
buy actual copies of books or print them out yourself
Sebastian Ortiz
become autistic and learn to use "git annex"
build your own library
Daniel Ross
Nothing of value will be lost.
All the knowledge you will ever need is already written down.
So long as that is safe we don't have to worry.
Alexander Williams
I have downloaded the WP database for local use. Now I have to build a power-sipping computer to read it on in case of SHTF.
Charles Rogers
sadly the written word is accessible to a increasingly small number of people. videos that show basic skills of construction, gardening, sewing, etc. are far more accessible. I agree that 99.9% of what's on the internet is shit, but it has shown us how information can be efficiently transferred between people.
Thomas Turner
But what about knew knowledge being made now? Look at our infographics for an example. They don't exactly lend themselves to easy printing.
Going above 700KB for storage, and puretext for data, was a mistake.
Gopher > HTTP
Asher Cook
That's just because of a change in how the internet works, and the capability of it. All sorts of tutorials were spread in textfiles back in the day.
how many people read those text files, vs. how many people watch youtube videos about the same ideas?
Dominic Gutierrez
Very few, but that wasn't the point I was making. If we were still at dialup speed it would still be all text with the occasional monochrome GIF image if you're lucky.
