[PaulWaldman]

It will be interesting to see the durability of print vs digital content of time.

Many web properties are no longer accessible due to M&A activity and Small/solo publishers unable or unwilling to maintain their assets. Archives like WayBack Machine mitigates some of the loss of digital content so long as the archives themselves are still maintained.

Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?

[jamesfinlayson]

> Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?

Not sure how long microfiche lasts for but someone posted a link here not too long ago about how record companies had embraced magnetic hard drives in the 1990s to store music masters and are starting to find that the drives are no longer readable.

[kevindamm]

It depends a lot on the humidity and heat or light in the environment where the microfiche are being stored. But they should be able to retain their data for 500 or so years.

CDs and Laserdiscs are also seeing bitrot. The layer of material that is etched does degrade over time. Error correction helps some, but if it's a writable CD or DVD it's only likely to last a decade or two. M-Drives are CDs that are designed to retain their data for about 1000 years and can be writable by specific consumer drives. Not sure how long the professionally pressed CDs last but it's not that long.

[rhplus]

We can all help in a small way. Archive.org is a non-profit and always needs financial support.

https://archive.org/donate

[ghaff]

As photography was largely switching to digital, I sometimes wondered whether--whatever the preservation possibilities that digital offered--to what degree photos would really be preserved in practice relative to prints and slides.

[bluGill]

Most photos are terrible. Colors can start fading in at little as 10 years if they were hanging on your wall that long. B&W can last longer, but still will fade. Of course there are different process, if you use the best process photos will last longer, but still they are not very stable.

Digital makes it cheap and easy to have multiple in many locations. While any one media may fail, you still have a copy - I have on this computer all the data from whatever computer I was using 15 years ago. (most of it I have not looked at in 20 years and I could safely delete, but it is still here, and on other backup systems I have)