From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: aek@bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:40:23 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Whence 1st Edition Unix Kernel Assembly? In-Reply-To: References: <20080423060356.GA88398@minnie.tuhs.org> <20080423060721.GA92411@minnie.tuhs.org> <20080424000736.GA48312@minnie.tuhs.org> <4810B69F.1000500@bitsavers.org> <143F6603-5D78-4C0E-B159-F421657356C9@tfeb.org> <4810C050.3030507@bitsavers.org> <8dd2d95c0804241027x3280724aq8d48bdf044b690a2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4810D417.8040005@bitsavers.org> ckeck at texoma.net wrote: > What about magneto-optical disks? They are supposed to last 50 years. This is the wrong way to think about preservation of digital data, which is inherently easy to duplicate without loss. You don't want to wait 50 years to find out there is no economical way to read the media someone wrote in the past. As John said: "Archiving can be done on any medium: what matters is that there is someone with the right, the power, and the concern to make copies of it periodically onto new media." The critical point to add to this is that the data integrity needs to be constantly verified, even on presumed stable storage, and it is migrated to what at that time is easily to deal with storage, so you CAN easily verify it.