It is interesting to realize that a lot of this "old
school technology" has
survived many a decade yet modern devices like CDs, DVDs,
and hard drives
often have much shorter shelf lives.
One of the philosophical founders of media
theory, Marshal McLuhan said; "the medium is the message."
This is probably more true today than it was when he coined
the phrase, given all the hyperbole around the collection of
metadata on the net these days.
The issue with recording data electronically is
bit-rot. This problem is amplified by making a copy of a copy
of a copy etc. Having a master copy, no matter what the form,
would be be beneficial for any data recovery expert, should
they have an urgent need to reconstruct the original data
after suspected corruption.
bit-rot is not new but dates back to the earliest recording
technologies(clay tablets) where people copying something they would
make errors and the meaning of the work would change slightly.
When books were copied by hand the error rate was very high but the
move to the printing press dramatically reduced the error rate.
The current state of the art in error detection and correction has
an amazingly low error rate and some schemes can suffer large chunks
of data loss.
What are the chances that someone on this mailing list will see a
misspelled word due to bit-rot?
I have some old records that I converted to digital recordings
because I liked the music and cranking up the old gramophone is so
much more work than point and click.
I can assure you that my "master" copies suffered from bit-rot but
at least now the loss per replay has gone down by a factor measured
in 10 to the power of some number.
We can't reverse entropy, at least not yet. The
best we can hope to do is retard it. Whether data is corrupted
by dust and scratches in vinyl or cd records, we should always
be able to recreate the old technology used for the creation
of media at the time it was originally written. Except of
course that which is lost to the ancient past, like the lazer
anti gravity devices used by the Egyptians to cut and stack
rocks into pyramids.
We have the lazers but fall short on the
anti-gravity devices. Personally I believe that if we don't
bit-rot the planet first, we will get there eventually. ;-)
What happens when we digitally encode the world with next gen ECC
systems.
We can live forever and never have to worry about forgetting our
stupid mistakes because they will be preserved with perfect digital
fidelity.