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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Since it appears this happened 8 years ago, and uh, I can’t say that I’ve seen a single MP3 file since then, perhaps nobody still cares.

    If you’re building a music library, and you’re NOT using some sort of lossless format, I’d love to know why. I know a lot of people with massive libraries, medium libraries, and just shit they like one song at a time and not a one of them isn’t using FLAC files for it.

    They might transcode into something occasionally, but it’s always something like AAC or OPUS, not MP3.





  • The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

    Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

    The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won’t be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

    As for data integrity, there’s a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

    The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you’re using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that’s not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the “good” hashes is on the drive, well, you can’t necessarily trust those hashes either.


  • So, 50 years isn’t a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they’re stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.

    You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it’s started rotting.

    Long term archival storage really isn’t just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.

    Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon’s problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)


  • Do some people? Sure. There’s more than a few sects of evangelicals that are all in on the end of the world.

    But, frankly, outside of certain religious sects and/or cults, I strongly doubt it’s all that widespread.

    Even the preppers I know don’t want it to collapse, they’re just aware that society is fragile and is more likely than not going to collapse - knowing something is likely to happen and preparing for it is very very different than hoping for it.

    I’m terminally doomer, but even I don’t really think that the “world is ending” is a likely outcome, even if the worst of everything possible happens.

    The question, for me, has always not been ‘will humans die out’ so much as ‘can we stop squabbling over stupid shit long enough we don’t all die’.


  • I’m using blu-ray disks for the 3rd copy, but I’m not backing up nearly as much data as you are.

    The only problem with optical media is that you should only expect it to be readable for a couple of years, best case, at this point and probably not even that as the tier 1 guys all stop making it and you’re left with the dregs.

    You almost certainly want some sort of tape option, assuming you want long retention periods and are only likely to add incremental changes to a large dataset.

    Edit: I know there’s longer-life archival optical media, but for what that costs, uh, you want tape if at all possible.











  • I’m wagering they don’t do anything at all anywhere. The absolute most might be a ‘happy pride!’ page buried somewhere.

    But, honestly, as a gay dude, I don’t care. This was all performative nonsense anyways. It was, at the very best, just some virtue signalling bullshit marketing thought might sell another car or book or potato or whatever the fuck, and never ever actually meant support or willingness to stand on principles or even get fucking involved in anything - though, I’ll admit, there were a very few exceptions to that.

    There’s lots of shit needed, but an avatar picture that’s just fucking marketing from trillion dollar companies ain’t it, boss.