JasonFleischer's Journal: Why the hell am I writing this on a blog then?

Orlowski on The Reg points out that our digital lives may be as ephemeral as a sand painting. How will you feel if you can't view your blog entries or your photos in 15 years?

Ahh, but what is permanant?

[nizo]

I will be happy if my pile of digital pictures and documents survive until I die (or quit caring about them). Indeed, had any of this stuff ever been permanant before? How many pictures and writings of plain old everyday people from the 1800s survives today? With careful backups I think all the digital stuff I care about will be around until I die, but what about my (mostly useless) comments? I think the opposite may happen: short of some major disaster, all this junk will live forever, shuffled around from

Re:Ahh, but what is permanant?

[JasonFleischer]

OK, fair enough. But the point is that most of us don't work at trying to preserve our memories, but really do enjoy accidentally turning up Great Aunt Matilda's wedding photo album or her diary when cleaning up an attic. That sort of thing will never happen with digital info archived on some obsolete and unreadable format. And anyway regular photos usually last about 80 years while a recordable CD is about 8 years. Big difference.