this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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There is also cassette tapes, reels, wax cylinders, laser discs... Analog supports degrade over time. Digital files do not.
Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that's good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.
Digital files have checksums. You literally know when something has changed and you lost information. And then you have error-correction on top.
How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn't copy it to another one a checksum won't help you.
And if your vinyl collection catches fire it also gets lost, what's your point? That's an argument for preservation of storage media, not for intrinsic benefits of analog.
You cannot possibly be this stupid. I refuse to believe it. If you stuff a vinyl record in a cabinet for a century, you'll still have a mostly functional recording. If you stuff an SSD in a cabinet for a decade you'll probably just have a paperweight at the end, and that's comparing 70 year old analog storage technology to the current standard of digital storage. This is a consistent pattern throughout all of history. Analog storage is just far, far more robust to data loss. All the error-correction in the world doesn't help if you aren't actually running that error-correction constantly forever. That is the entire point I've been trying to make this whole time that everyone just keeps ignoring to spout non sequiturs about how digital data transmission works at me.
So your only point is "analog has less maintenance". Sure, it has less maintenance. But digital with maintenance has no losses, and analog with maintenance does.
Yes, my "only" point is that analog has less maintenance. If you want anything to last more than a decade, maintenance is the only thing that matters. How long will something last is the same question as how hard is it to maintain. They are the same thing.