Related documentary that comes to mind: Digital Amnesia (2014) [1]
It broke my heart seeing those librarians in disbelief when their national library was sold off to the highest bidder. When they said "It seems our country does not value our own culture anymore".
Books lasted hundreds of years. Good luck trying to read a floppy from the 90s, or even DVDs that are already beyond their lifetime and are a very recent medium.
It gets worse when you read the fine print of the SSD specifications, wherein they state that an SSD may lose all its data after 2 weeks without power, and data retention rates are at less than 99%, meaning they will degrade after the first year of use. And don't get me started on SMR HDDs, I lost enough drives already :D
Humanity has a backup problem. We surely live in Orwellian times because of it.
The way I remember it, if you tried to read a floppy from the very early 90s, or from the 80s, you'd probably have no trouble at all, even many years later. You can probably still read floppies from the 80s without issue.
However, if tried to read a floppy from the late 90s, or 2000s, even when the floppy was new, good luck! The quality of floppy disks and drives took a steep nose-dive sometime in the 90s, so even brand-new ones failed.
This. I have a few hundreds of 80s floppies (especially the less popular 3 inch CF2 format), and some from the 90s. They read well, at least as long as you don't leave them in the drive when idle (the magnetic head may affect them!). But the last decades of floppies were of horrible quality. I remember them failing after a month.
The vast majority of my 5 1/4" floppies (including "HD" 1.2MB ones) read just fine still. The vast majority (just about 100%) of my old 3.5" HD (1.44MB) floppies are unreadable. The 3.5" 720kB ones are mostly ok. Stored under the same conditions.
Also good luck trying to find a floppy drive. Yes, I'm sure you can buy one now but five or ten years from now? I'd say manufacture of the drives isn't exactly a booming business.
Younger me thought I was smart repurposing my SSDs as shockproof 2.5" external backup drives. Suffice it to say that I was a year abroad, and came back to losing all my data because of it. I was able to recover some parts, but most of it was gone.
Only buying CMR surveillance-class HDDs now for my backups. They're limited to 8TB for a 3.5" sized HDD, but that's far better as a compromise than the nightmare of losing all digital copies of tax documents that you have to keep - mandated by law - for at least 10 years.
When that happened I had to renew my ID, and had to find the original birth certificate in paper form in the hospital's paper archive to get a signed copy, and had to go there with multiple relatives to prove my identity. Just to get my ID renewed. That incident surely made me realize how important backups are.
> Only buying CMR surveillance-class HDDs now for my backups.
I have no way to confirm if this is true, however someone years ago told me that surveillance drives have inferior error correction and are optimized to not block recording in case of errors because they work on the assumption that you are storing videos, therefore if you miss a frame that's not a big problem if the rest of the file is fine. That of course would be a big issue in case of other data, especially if compressed. Again, no proof of that, but it's enough for me to avoid them for archival until I can be sure the above turns out as untrue.
On the flip side I built a PC back in 2016 (with two SSD's) which went into storage about 6 months later. I just got that PC back this year and it booted up just fine with all the data intact.
It broke my heart seeing those librarians in disbelief when their national library was sold off to the highest bidder. When they said "It seems our country does not value our own culture anymore".
Books lasted hundreds of years. Good luck trying to read a floppy from the 90s, or even DVDs that are already beyond their lifetime and are a very recent medium.
It gets worse when you read the fine print of the SSD specifications, wherein they state that an SSD may lose all its data after 2 weeks without power, and data retention rates are at less than 99%, meaning they will degrade after the first year of use. And don't get me started on SMR HDDs, I lost enough drives already :D
Humanity has a backup problem. We surely live in Orwellian times because of it.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs