in mass effect 2 one of the salarian npcs says something like "you can never have enough redundancy with digital storage" and it's shaped the the way i use computers to this day
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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It's also important for space travel and is why I find the idea of a private company in charge of space exploration very silly
And here I am with a single USB stick backup holding up the tower of cards
🎸🎶🎶 shake hands with danger 
You just know some clueless c suite chucklehead got hoodwinked by a smooth sales presentation and FOMO over “the cloud is the future” into signing this contract.
Not just that, but the C suite probably ignored warnings of that vendor going defunct and didn't copy/migrate/backup the data.
Backups are always seen as inefficiencies by the bean counters. "What, you mean we have to pay 3X as much for storage for no reason!?"
the reality is that the could is the future. as in "i could have done better smh"
Stone tablets with dick drawings survived 10000 years but these chucklefucks can't preserve our history for 100
Unfortunately we did in fact lose the vast majority of dick drawings made 10,000 years ago and what has survived did so through mere chance. Not much has changed really.
We probably shouldn't store all our dick drawings in one place
I think it's actually worse now than in the past.
All our paper and ink degrade very fast compared to the ones used historically; laser-printed stuff is even worse; and digital media (with the possible exception of tape, which might be slightly better than paper) worse than both. All our modern data is stored on such media.
There are some projects that exist; such as the memory of mankind project, which uses human-readable laser-etched ceramic tablets stored in an abandoned salt mine for long term archival. They also have ceramic micro-film, but one of their requirements is that the most important data can be read without any need for a computer, etc. hence the aforementioned larger tablets.
It's relatively small scale though.
Our information density is wildly higher though, you can't look at only media lifetime.
I was thinking about long-term historical traces (for which higher density tends to mean less lifetime), based on the dick drawings comment above; you're right for other considerations though.
Check out the Domesday Project
The BBC set out to store a bunch of data for future generations. They thought that putting it on laser-discs would allow people to read it centuries from now.
Within 25 years, it was basically unuseable.
Modern humans are soooooo good at this.
I wish the final paragraph was the first paragraph.
It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data. And at least there's still a chance — it's not like the fire that the South Korean government experienced last year, which saw 858TB of data go up in smoke.
When the average homelab hobbyist has a better backup strategy than a major broadcaster. 
public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
Ahhh yes suing the business that's gone bankrupt I'm sure that always works.
Iron Mountain did not go bankrupt, a middleman company called OSS did. Iron Mountain had a contract with OSS to store the data, and can't release it to anyone else without a court order. Nine PBS is suing Iron Mountain to get that court order so they can legally retrieve there data.
Never trust a cloud
70 years of television is not 50tb. 50 tb is like how much storage a typical reddit nerd has.
Let's say 1 hour is 1 GB. It's not, 1 hour at 1080p is like 5 GB at least, but let's imagine.
50,000 hours is ~6 years. Did PBS only produce 6 years of video over a 50 year period?
50tb is just not that much storage for a television channel. The older stuff probably also is recorded on film or physical media.
The total amount of video that PBS has is probably in the PETABYTES, not terabytes.
This isn't all of PBS, just Nine PBS out of St. Louis, MO.
Like the majority of PBS stations, most of their content isn't original. They broadcast tons of stuff made by WGBH, for example. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that only 6 years of original video was produced at this station in the last 50 years.
6 years of video over a 50 year period
Is Nine PBS like a local news station? If so, then they would only be producing half an hour of content per day, which is about 1 year over a 50-year period.
probably compressed fam and the old shit won't be hd
the old shit won't be hd
I can tell that you were born after 9/11 based on this comment. That's not how anything works. Old shit was filmed on film, it is made HD by scanning the film. Old shit doesn't have smaller file sizes.
Do you ever wonder why you can buy 1960s movies on bluray in 1080p? It's because old films were still HD, they were stored on analog on film reels. Old shit is made digital recently by scanning the film reels.
Not all TV was shot on film, especially live TV which in the early days was often not even stored at all and a lot of what was shot on film was on 16mm which can be digitized at lower definition with out loss. But most important is that the lack of concern for preservation is not new. Most of the legacy media companies already lost considerable parts of their history well before digitization was even on the cards and were typically lazy about digitizing anything that wasn't immediately monetizeable once it was.
You're thinking of film cameras used for motion pictures. While some shows were shot on 35mm or 16mm film, you're forgetting that a ton of television particularly in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was shot with 525-line analog NTSC TV cameras. This was especially true for lower budget productions like most PBS content. Nobody's bringing out the 35mm camera for an all-night live fundraising telethon, that's way too expensive.
This stuff was stored using reel to reel video tape recorders on 2" Quadruplex film or later on U-matic or Betacam tapes (if your station was lucky enough to get one. You might have just made do with 2" Quad til the station manager eventually bought a consumer VHS recorder some time in the 80s.)
Could be low quality original archives that were then digitized at like 480p, depending on when they made the archive.
Amazon published an article about how they made a cloud backup of BBC archives, UK tv channel. The article says that 100 years of BBC content amounted to 25 petabytes of storage (~25000 TB). I would think that PBS archives would need a similar amount of storage.
the bbc archive is across multiple channels that almost exclusively produce original programming
from what i understand, 9 pbs is a local news channel that mostly airs syndicated shows
Videos with the sizes per hour mentioned by OP are already highly compressed.
All data will be lost eventually. Catastrophically or piecemeal.
Even though everything dies you should still try to keep it alive the best you can regardless
No, sorry, I mean digital data. Like all these computer stuff. It is a severe problem that we don't really have a way to backup out enormous amounts of data in a way that will last, say, 100 years. We're currently living in a dark age.
m-discs and blurays supposedly will last many centuries with data intact in a dry cave, but can't store very much per disc.
Yeah, storage capacity is a big part of the issue. We can carve data into stone, but not a lot.
There was an announcement some months back that a very durable, very high capacity data crystal had been made in a lab, but I can't comment on the prospects for such tech becoming widely accessible.
blurays supposedly will last many centuries
My toddler has entered the chat
TBF most storage media are weak to toddler
I’ve found the most resilient storage format is board books and even they take a beating after a while
Oh right muh bad
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Honestly it's just funny... the empire that thrives off of, and is built upon erasing and defacing other peoples' histories, cultures, etc. is also now fumbling with their own (though it's not like as if their "history" and culture as they try to preserve it isn't almost entirely made of shameless lies). Self-inflicted "karmic justice," if not even 1/1,000,000th of what they have done to others- not that anyone else even wants to do to the west what they do to the rest of the world, they are their own worst enemies, and their only true enemies.
The rest of the world, and those suppressed groups within the core whose histories are actually precious to them- those who the US tried to erase- will live on, and the only thing the rest of the world really needs to remember of the empire is its hatefulness and treachery, hopefully even their descendants will disown them and base their identities on rejecting and being better than them.
...perhaps there's a bit more spite to my usual schtick from just seeing some typical racist/"colonialism was good actually" bullshit. But it's not like any of what I said is incorrect either, I'd love to be proven wrong in a positive sense but this always works too.
Fucking enraging
local network attached storage servers stay winning.
lmaoooooo fucking morons not even keeping a local archive of their own works? that's pleb shit
non zero chance there was a directive to outsource archival hosting/services. a strategy of austerity and neoliberalism is for decision makers to force public institutions to form "public-private" partnerships or generally contract out services to the private sector rather than even consider doing the work in-house. in this way, the public institution evolves into a pass-through organization where public resources go right back into profit-maximizing rent-seekers.
they scraped it for AI and then sold the hard drives
Surely a cloud storage provider like this would offsite backups on tape, right?
:^)
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