On the other hand electronic versions can be copied over and over. If you think about it, we have preserved many ancient text that have been copied again and again, like biblical texts, greek philosophers, etc. Even though the originals are long gone. And those were copied by hand.
I think that copying over on new media will be much safer, particularly as the cost of storage is ever cheaper, and a cheap consumer drive today can store many times all the books that have been written in the world to date in text format.
Yeah. It's probably a data management and cultural problem, not so much a technological one.
It would be comparatively easy to maintain historical continuity of old data over time, as long as storage costs keep decreasing. Could also have a system like Git or Fossil, that automatically retains history, or just move stuff to an `archive.subdomain` when you're done hosting it. The Internet Archive's budget was only $36 million in 2019; it seems like it'd also add barely a rounding error for any government or large corporation to sponsor it as a safe place to park data long-term.
The problem is that people don't always copy old data to new media, or make redundant copies of current data, and do the other things you need to do to keep digital data safe. Instead we leave it sitting on old hard drives that are slowly rotting away, or simply remove/unpublish/delete it when it's no longer getting enough views. And this is exacerbated by the fact that the systems we use don't provide easy and scalable ways to preserve data by default, so it incurs extra effort and cost to do so.
Society-level information retention and integrity doesn't directly help push out new monetizable products, so there's little economic incentive for anybody to care about it.
The culturally important stuff will probably survive, because people will copy that, just as has always been the case. But as was also the case through history, much more will also be lost, which kinda sucks, especially given the sheer amount of information produced and at risk these days, and the thought that we probably could save all or most of it given modern technology.
> The problem is that people don't always copy old data to new media, or make redundant copies of current data, and do the other things you need to do to keep digital data safe
but how many selfies from medieval era do you want to preserve? Instagram is receiving 10s of millions new photos a day.
I think that copying over on new media will be much safer, particularly as the cost of storage is ever cheaper, and a cheap consumer drive today can store many times all the books that have been written in the world to date in text format.