• tibi@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    Only downside is that only data that people care about right now is being saved. But what seems useless now might become valuable in the future. It’s hard to grasp how much data has been forgotten on some old computers, or some CDs, or websites that have gone dark.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        25 days ago

        I want my journal to die with me. It’s got a lot of painfully honest stuff that could hurt the people I love.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      25 days ago

      I really hope the Internet Archive survive their lawsuits. They’re important not just for archival of websites (the Wayback Machine) but also of books, audio recordings, etc. There’s a large amount of old content that’s only archived at the Internet Archive.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    About that… we could record someone’s every word and different people would read entirely different things into it. Consider how strangers have reacted to your own internet comments.

  • Krik@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    25 days ago

    Storing data for decades or even centuries is a difficult thing. But the problem isn’t the storage it’s the data format!

    Who knows if a person 300 years from now has a program that can open .png or .jpg? Or the dreaded .doc and .xls that even Microsoft has problems with today. This poor future fellow probably won’t have the capatibilities and might need a few years or decades to develop a reader app.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      25 days ago

      You could archive a description of the file format alongside the files. Maybe a pseudocode implementation too, or actual code (although who knows which programming languages will exist 300 years from now).

      Or the dreaded .doc and .xls that even Microsoft has problems with today.

      The US Library of Congress recommends archiving data in SQLite databases, since it’s a simple, well-documented format, SQLite is public domain, and SQLite devs have promised to support it for a long time and retain backwards compatibility indefinitely.

      CSV and TSV are okay too of course, but it’s often much easier to deal with large datasets if they’re in an actual database format.

  • TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz
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    26 days ago

    See, that’s why I started using JPEG-XL for long-term storage. Apart from being better in every aspect for lossless and near-lossless still images than any competitor, the generation loss even over 1000 lossy save and load cycles is negligible.

    • Steve Dice@sh.itjust.works
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      26 days ago

      That really doesn’t matter when someone screenshots your JPEG-XL and posts it in a website that transcodes it to WEBP and adds a water mark.

    • tibi@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      But converting from a format to another is a lossy process. It’s best to just keep whatever original format you have, unless you are creating the images yourself.