Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Archiving all the TV newsbroadcasts

I listened to this piece on NPR yesterday.  There is an organization that has been archiving all TV news broadcasts going back to he 1960s.  Cool.  They went on to describe various obsolete technologies, used on the older archive, videotape, VHS, and how they had transcribed everything to DVD's.  And, they plan to move the entire archive to "the cloud" real soon now. 
  Me, I have serious doubts about the reliability of "the cloud", especially after natural disasters or war.  I'd feel better with racks of tapes or DVD's, and the machines to play them, in a nice deep underground site that I owned, outright.  A site on high ground and away from city centers. 
   For that matter, I have never read anything about the life of a home burned DVD.  Are they truly permanent? Or does the data fade away after ten years or so?  The old floppy disks would become unreadable after a few years in a desk drawer. 

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