My Pa told me to keep my floppy disks clean. Having a dirty disk that damages drives that damages other disks that damages other drives was an early lesson. This was also the analogy for sex education.
Having burnt backups to CD rom and having them fail in a matter of weeks, I became aware that our media is very prone to destruction. Reading a book where a map was needed, but it had decayed alerted me to acid free archival paper.
Then I learned that our film that is stockpiled in vaults is failing too.
Then even our Y chromosomes are Xes with an arm that has been breaking off for many years.
New M1 on Apple products are ewaste because the storage that is built into the chip has a highly limited lifespan.
We are going to lose so much of our information. We have to have the datacenters repeatedly replicate our data with 3 copies and error correction to keep it around. Then we learn that forces come in and destroy our libraries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if our ferrite core wound computer programs for the space program outlive our printed media, and that outlived our hard drives and ssds.
Our batteries have limited cycles too!
I propose that we develop and work on using mram in our computers for storing the most important of our works. Our cryptographic keys and basic operating system should be unimpeachable. The very core of the system should be immutable.
If we have tamper resistant fusible write once memory that could be a great thing. We turn in our assignments on a device that can last a long time, and edits to it are appended to it, made with a diff.
I want storage that can last for thousands of years.
I was really rooting for optane, and other phase change memory, I am not sure if this is write back like dram.. but it may be possible to do a low cost storage that can survive shock.
I’ve had one hard drive fail, and it gave good warnings.
I’ve had two fail because of user error, where one was dropped and the other had a bad power cable given to it.
I don’t want to be managing a NAS forever.
Geographically separate, shock resistant, write once, infinite read cycles, tempurature resistant.