My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

  • futatorius
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    6 days ago

    The commonly used optical disk technologies degrade over time. CD-RW more rapidly than CDR. It’s even worse for higher-density media.

    • XTL@sopuli.xyz
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      6 days ago

      And for bigger data sets, the capacity isn’t there. And writable media is getting more rare. Probably because of the same reason.