Can you read data off a floppy disk today? How many others can? How many in fifty years can? The point is that left alone our physical media of today is not compatible in the future because you need specialty tools to read it.
Anyone can pickup and read a piece of paper or a rock with carvings in it. The point is that not only does the media need to survive, but the means to make use of it needs to survive as well.
That is the key issue with technology today. Someone needs to keep loving the data from floppy to zip drive to thumb drive to hard drive to whatever is next or it’s lost.
Dasus@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why on Earth would we lose the ability to read simple magnetic discs?
Yes, I can read data off floppy disk today due to having a floppy drive somewhere in my storage. And even if I didn’t, it’d cost like at most 5 euros to get one.
It’s rather trivial. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_storage
And what data exactly are there on floppy disks that isn’t on other media? Like… globally culturally significant data.
Can you read ancient Greek? I can’t, but I still know about the Trojan Horse. I can’t read Biblical Hebrew, but I know about the ten commandments. How?