[HN Gopher] The online data that's being deleted
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The online data that's being deleted
Author : Someone
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-07-18 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's okay!!
|
| "What are my children or any potential grandchildren [...] going
| to do with the 400 pictures of my pet that are on my phone?"
| Nothing, they don't need it. You sit your grandkid on your lap
| and look in their eyes and _tell them_ stories about the family
| dog. They 'll be happy to listen, they don't gain much by seeing
| your 400 photos.
|
| I guess it's a natural human impulse to try to leave a mark for
| the future. But the future will be okay, they don't need our crap
| data dumps. There's way more useless fluff being generated than
| what needs to be preserved. People survived when there was no
| photography.
|
| Yes, preserve your wedding photos, a few important life events
| here and there, that can be fun to look at for your kids. The
| full camera roll on your phone? Who cares? Let's not burden the
| coming generations with all this stuff. The future is theirs, not
| ours.
|
| For the few things that you want to preserve, make high quality
| physical prints. Their huge benefit is that they don't break
| silently. It's utterly obvious when looking at the physical
| object that it still "holds your data", as opposed to an HDD, DVD
| or tape which you need to put in a machine to check if it's still
| readable, which you won't reliably do. Analog printouts are a
| very robust preservation format. They can burn, but DVDs and HDDs
| aren't fireproof either (backup printouts are a solution too).
| Yes, prints may degrade in color, but it's a transparent process.
|
| But overall, forests need to clean themselves by fires, there
| needs to be a clean slate. I don't want to know who my great-
| great-grandparents were. I don't want their family photos. Maybe
| they were bad people, criminals etc. Maybe there was domestic
| abuse, trauma, tragedy etc. I don't need to know. I want to live
| my life with the people that are alive in the now. I don't want
| my ancestors to haunt me from the grave. And I don't want to
| haunt my descendants.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| So true. When I had to clean out my parents' house after my mom
| died, there were boxes and boxes of photos. Just in boxes, not
| really organized. Had been saved for years. I gave some thought
| to scanning them, but ultimately was honest and told myself
| that nobody had ever looked at these and nobody ever would. So
| they just got thrown away. Nobody really cares, years later,
| about day to day minutia preserved like this.
| jedberg wrote:
| My wife and I used to get prints of all of our photos when we
| first started dating. Then we switched to digital, a lot of which
| has been lost on old hard drives. When we got married we had a
| really hard time finding photos of us as a couple because most
| had been lost.
|
| Now that we have kids we back up our photos in multiple places,
| but we also make sure to print out the ones we really like, just
| in case. The really good ones we print on canvas and hang on the
| walls.
|
| But it's true, most of records would be lost if there were a
| global cataclysm that took out all digital records. That being
| said, I'm pretty sure our mortgage is only digital so at least we
| would own our house free and clear!
| judge2020 wrote:
| > That being said, I'm pretty sure our mortgage is only digital
| so at least we would own our house free and clear!
|
| Very similar to what happens in Mr. Robot where the plan is to
| encrypt all of the biggest worldwide bank's records so that
| they're inaccessible, thus wiping out the majority of debt.
| daanvd wrote:
| If the world suddenly turns into a Mad Max movie set, your
| debtors will still hunt you down. Don't just assume your debt
| will magically disappear.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Creditors would be doing the hunting.
| drclau wrote:
| How will they know who to hunt if all the records are gone?
| new_guy wrote:
| Wouldn't matter. It'd be on you to prove you don't owe
| _them_ money.
| floydnoel wrote:
| Thanks for the spoiler...
| codetrotter wrote:
| Afaict, they are referencing s04e09. It came out Dec 1
| 2019.
|
| If you didn't watch it yet, were you ever really going to?
|
| Imo, spoilers without warnings are fair after 3 months
| time+ for TV shows and movies. Maybe even sooner.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| New people are being born all the time who haven't had
| the opportunity to watch the entire history of television
| (or even just the best 10%). By spoiling a show that
| you've watched, you're denying them the opportunity to
| experience the joy that you had.
| jedberg wrote:
| Spoiler alert!
| gruez wrote:
| but what about backups and/or other supporting documents?
| You'd have to hit multiple places at the same time, some of
| which aren't fully digital.
| mceachen wrote:
| Oh man, I hear you: I had a mess just like that, tried to find
| something to automatically sweep everything into a neat pile,
| couldn't find it, and ended up writing PhotoStructure:
| https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/
| bromuro wrote:
| On the other side, our facebook data will never be deleted.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| I met somebody once who told me that digital drives expire and
| will lose data unless they are "fired up" from time to time.
| Because of that, his company had a system of taking out and doing
| reads on their old storage in a clunky and manual way throughout
| the year. I wasn't able to find out why this was necessary or the
| time frames involved. Can anybody confirm or deny or explain?
| Someone wrote:
| There were (?are?) hard drives where the drive heads would
| stick to the surface if the drive wasn't used for long periods
| (https://burgessforensics.com/data-recovery-myths-and-
| misconc...)
| dehrmann wrote:
| Over time, flash memory leaks the charge that holds your data.
| Here's an explanation I found:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5cexmj/how_stab...
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| > FLASH memory works by essentially placing some electrons on
| an insulated island of material through quantum tunnelling
| and then "trapping" them there. However, there is some
| probability that they can tunnel off, and thus the stored
| charge does leak out over time. How long it takes for enough
| charge to leak off that a "read" can't tell the difference
| (signal to noise wise) depend on the manufacturer and
| specifications but 10 years is definitely in the danger zone.
| There's also a stress degradation issue but that probably
| doesn't apply here.
|
| Thanks for the link!
| abeppu wrote:
| The idea of protecting data against catastrophic events reminds
| me of the KEO satellite project, which I think is not yet
| officially dead but has been delayed to the point that it seems
| doomed. But they aspired to put a lot of data in a very durable
| format on a satellite, to act as a kind of time capsule, intended
| to be recovered tens of thousands of years into the future. I
| think the intent was to use optical media, but made of glass.
|
| Clearly this isn't yet an example of successfully preserving
| data. But the mindset of setting a goal to make something
| readable in the very distant future seems admirable.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I started at the Library of Congress 20 years ago this month
| working on their digitization effort. It was HUGE even then - an
| estimated 50TB/day needed to be digitized - and that did not
| address the 200+ years of backlog or the advent of blogging (rare
| at the time), streaming media, and everything else online.
|
| Our mission was to ensure that the assets we were working with
| were usable by someone ~100 years from now.
|
| We would take something like an LP (Ray Charles was one of my
| favorites) and play it and record it in a lossless wav at a high
| bitrate. Then we'd take the physical record, the entire sleeve,
| and anything else included and scan that at 300dpi in tiff. Of
| course, we'd document every piece of equipment we used (down to
| the serial number) with every setting and who did the work. If we
| later realized a given piece of equipment was misconfigured, we
| could detect what had been created with it and adjust or re-
| create as necessary. I wrote some of the standards (XML schemas)
| for metadata collection which were still in use as late as 2015.
| (They may still be, I haven't checked.)
|
| Whew.
|
| Then we'd take a version of the audio and images to create mp3s
| and jpgs for listening+viewing in the reading rooms. The original
| physical media would go into nitrogen filled vaults in Culpepper,
| Virginia to prevent oxidization and further deterioration.*
|
| We had similar processes for other media like books, wire spool
| recordings (popular in WW2), wax cylinder recordings, and
| pictures around the Civil War. Many of them were exceptionally
| fragile and required special equipment. My least favorite but
| most fascinating were Thomas Edison's first motion pictures.
|
| Pop quiz: What does cotton and silver nitrate degrade into? ;)
|
| But in all of those cases, we could go back to the original media
| which - hopefully - hadn't deteriorated beyond recovery. In a
| digital-first or digital-only environment, we're counting on
| fragile components storing file formats that rot on operating
| systems that are deprecated in physical locations that may suffer
| disasters.
|
| * At the time, the RIAA was complaining endlessly and we _may_
| have made jokes about RIAA execs and those vaults but I can
| neither confirm nor deny any such proposals.
| detaro wrote:
| > _Pop quiz: What does cotton and silver nitrate degrade into?
| ;)_
|
| Bright light if you look at it wrong?
| ksec wrote:
| Yeap. And we don't have a reliable Data Storage solution. Given
| the extreme low chances of disaster like fire, having a physical
| item is still so much better.
|
| We need a cheap storage solution that is reliable. Doesn't need
| to be fast. Even DVD dont last longer than 10 years.
|
| Someday this whole thing is going to back fire and we move back
| to hybrid / photobooks.
| Andrex wrote:
| Glass seems fairly promising.
|
| > Microsoft and Warner Bros. have collaborated to successfully
| store and retrieve the entire 1978 iconic "Superman" movie on a
| piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster, 75 by 75 by
| 2 millimeters thick.
|
| > The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot
| water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured,
| demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy
| priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go
| wrong.
|
| > "One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle
| of moving and rewriting data to the next generation. We really
| want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000
| years and forget about until you need it," Rowstron said.
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...
| abeppu wrote:
| > Scott says he thinks there should be legal or regulatory
| requirements on companies that give people the option to retrieve
| their data, for a certain period - say, five years - after an
| online service is due to shut down.
|
| I get the motivation here, but in addition to keeping the stored
| data, this means one must keep account and authentication
| systems, maintain a service and UI for people to request this
| data, etc for years. That seems like an excessive obligation,
| depending on what the product was which took in the data to begin
| with. What data should be eligible? If I ordered delivery from a
| service which folded, should I really be able to request my order
| records years later?
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(page generated 2021-07-18 23:01 UTC)