Somewhat related... I'm starting to think the fear we had 20 years ago about formats going obsolete is largely overblown. I know for sure that SOME formats will become unusable in another few decades, but the major things we all use for this type of stuff will pretty much never die. I bet we'll be able to open a GIF, JPG, PNG, MP4 in 100 years just as easily as we can today. There's just way too many of these things around now.<p>I know libraries and museums are full of oddball things like wire recorders and wax cylinders that are used as examples, but I'm just not sure that's applicable to most (not all) digital files now. I just can't imagine there will ever come a day where we'll say "It's time to convert these 1 billion PNGs we have saved to the latest greatest format or we'll never be able to use them". Hopefully I'll be alive in 30 years to see if I'm wrong :-)
Atm I have about 40TB of raw storage, of which 30TB are available and 18TB used for data. Most of that data is hoarded data. Stuff like the entire image archive of the apollo missions or all public domain research papers.<p>I find it very important that people keep this stuff around, the internet forgets so easily.
I can relate to this, although I to do this only on a very moderate level. As a side note, despite the technological advances of the last years, you can meet quite a lot of collectors in private direct connect hubs these days.
I can relate,too; but, I'm not sure I can access some of it. While some is on floppies and I can read them -- some have failed -- stuff that needs my Zip Drives or Bernoulli drives? I'm not sure either drive has survived the last few moves. (I know the Windows 98 computer runs; but, I'm not sure about the one with Windows 3.11.) Maybe that should be my project for 2019.