That Randy Brown

The half life of information storage

There was this great post on hacker news a while back--maybe the same one that introduced me to files over apps -- I wish I could find it. One of the comments within it mentioned something to the effect of the following:

If you want your data to be readable in 60 years, store it in a format that was readable 60 years ago.

I've talked a lot about the half life of information, but less about the half life of information storage and retrieval. But it turns out, that is roughly what this quote is referencing: that there is a half life for the formats of our storage mediums, both physical and digital, and similar to how we bias toward the information with a longer half life, we should bias toward a storage medium with a longer half life.

I am fortunate to have grown up with the rise of consumer electronics: tape decks and boomboxes, the iconic Walkman and portable CD players, VHS and DVD. A litany of media without a means to consume it. I have a stack of CD-RW in one of those clear plastic cylinders in my garage. My brother saw it the other day and asked me why they existed. I don't own a single device in my home that can read them anymore, much less write them. The same is true of my kindly labeled 'retro' Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 3DS games.

When I worked in the bank, I learned that there was a point when data was backed up to tape and put in cold storage, and at the time, this was a laughably out of date concept to me. It wasn't until much later, and more recently, that I realized that being out of date was almost entirely the point--that the format had proven staying power by staying around.

When I think about the data artifacts of the 21st century that will be here like a Rosetta Stone for archaeologists of the future, I certainly imagine data miners and decryptologists--finding new and more interesting ways to access a zip drive, but more than anything, I think the things that have proven staying power for millennia are more likely to be the promise against our vanishing: books, bottles, and rocks.