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Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by mysterydip on Thursday May 28, 2020 @10:20PM (#23345646)
With more information going to a cloud, and storage formats becoming obsolete faster, I wonder if we're actually better now. Certainly transitioning from hand-written and typewriter paper documents to digital has allowed for data to be copied easier than ever; however, I can still go to the library and read a book from 50 years ago or more. I can't do the same for digital data, at least not without specialized equipment and systems.
Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by karatestomp on Friday May 29, 2020 @04:01PM (#23354801)
Hell, pulp paperbacks, probably the worst books for longevity, from 70 years ago are usually fine as long as they've only been gently read a low-single-digits number of times and haven't gotten wet/mildewy. They're often past yellowing and into browning at the edges, but they're fine for reading.

Hardcovers from the 19th century are pretty common. Tons of low-value ones (textbooks, fiction by at-the-time very popular authors who've been forgotten) floating around at a couple dollars a piece in flea markets here in the US, and I bet even older books are somewhat common in Europe. Lots by famous authors but of course those are usually more expensive. Most of those weren't finely-printed on modern archival paper or anything like that, and haven't been kept in archival conditions, but often have a few years of hard-reading life left in them (and much more well-shelved), so 150-200 years is a fairly easy age to achieve for gently-read hardbacks using cheap (but not the very cheapest) materials. Maybe more if you re-bind them once or twice, or they're very rarely read.

That's without even getting into really nice material and binding, or very expensive non-paper for the pages if you're very serious about keeping a book in good shape for centuries. Not even tape comes close—we don't have a really good archival format for digital stuff yet, let alone one that normal people may have a bunch of in their houses (like books). Maybe one of the several long-lived storage formats under development will take off one of these days and our digital storage will get a bit less risky. Right now it's pretty bad, only saved by being extremely cheap compared to other options.

Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by partyboat1586 on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:02AM (#23348169)
Lots of documents are going 'paperless' these days to save the trees. Given what I've witnessed working in tech I'm worried that many of those systems will be backed by a single server with no backups. We are lucky that many of our documents are stored in email which is a little more robust but still it's no stone tablet.