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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I agree and have personally started hoarding physical books again because I don't trust electronic media to persist. It's happened before. A lot of info was lost when physical periodicals were converted to microfilm and destroyed.

That said, entrusting school librarians to preserve information is like asking the Christians to preserve the pagan scrolls in Alexandria. They have no problem destroying priceless artifacts of human genius (Huck Finn, Dr. Seuss) if it fits their ever-shifting ideological goals.

What do you mean by hoarding books? Do you by as many as you can or do you select certain ones you believe will become hard or impossible to find in the future? Also why don't you trust electronic media? Wouldn't it be better to just buy hard drives and then download everything you can come by via torrents, libgen e.t.c. and figure out some sort of backup plan?

I just mean that I'm buying physical books instead of electronic now. I'm not planning on being an Irish monk keeping the flame through the Dark Ages.

I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

What I don't trust in electronic media is this:

  • Corporations controlling art. For example, publishers changing the words to old Roald Dahl books and pushing this to people's devices.

  • Flawed digital conversion and storage processes. We know that books can last for hundreds of years with little human effort. In the 20th century, there was a large-scale effort to convert books and periodicals to microfilm with the original media destroyed. This destroyed a lot of knowledge. Even if microfilm readers weren't inferior to books (they are), the process destroyed information because it was done in a low-resolution way. Sometimes the conversion didn't work at all and the text was lost entirely. In other cases, information is made inaccessible because old devices no longer work. Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years? Original media should be preserved.

  • Corporations controlling personal information. We've all heard tales of corporations like Google destroying people's information or locking them out of their accounts. Why would we hold media with companies like this when we can just have physical?

Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years?

So far in the history of electronics/computing, I feel like there have been few actual dead ends on the question of transferrability, particularly when the stored data is already digital (and my sense is that probably a majority of analog data resulted in at least one device capable of conversion to digital, even if it wasn't widely used). So, I think I'd be less worried about whether we can get your digital file off of your 2020s hard drive and onto whatever storage medium people will be using in 2120.

File interpretability seems like potentially a more difficult challenge. Look at all the old, like, DOS software that is becoming harder and harder to use. Sure, DOS emulation exists now, built to run in Windows, but if we jump to a new class of OS, who is going to write the new DOS emulator? Or are we going to end up with chains of "new OS emulates Windows, where we have a DOS emulator"? This would seem incredibly brittle and unlikely to be well-maintained enough to not inevitably have some significant number of original files become unsupportable.

That said, when it comes to digital books in particular rather than executables and other files generally, I wonder if I can reel us back a bit. If I fire up Calibre and look to convert a book, I see 18 options. Not all of them are really relevant, but there are a bunch. So I think the numbers game works in a different direction than that of the DOS example. The trend for executables seems to be toward not many different OSs, so if at any point, one backwards chain doesn't get emulated, you lose everything prior that was dependent on that chain. For pure data storage formats, if I can freely and easily replicate the same data in 10 different formats, all I need is one to make it into the new OS, and I've still succeeded. Hopefully, the same numbers game will happen in the new OS, and that one surviving format will become convertible into whatever ten new formats come along with the new OS. That the other nine died is immaterial in this case.

So, perhaps the strategy is that we just need to have people like you continuing to fill their hard drives, but make sure you don't collapse everything down to a single format. Have a script in Calibre or something that automatically converts every book into every format and store all of them simultaneously. Storage is cheap, especially with file sizes for books being so small.

I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

Why mention RAID? I’m honestly curious because this comes up a lot with data hoarding. RAID helps with maintaining uptime and availability for an applications during a disk failure, but it does not provide backups. With RAID your capacity investment is diminished by mirroring or parity storage cost, which could be better allocated to additional backup media. Do you agree?

I disagree. The reason RAID is not a backup is because it does not protect against accidentally deleting data, and compared to an external backup the chance of something breaking both drives is greater because they're next to each other. However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work. In a company you can make it someone's job to verify the backups by periodically restoring them to a test system, but most individuals won't be doing that.

However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

I mean if I have 10 disks and split 5 into a data pool with no mirroring/parity and 5 into a backup set, then I have half the total capacity of all disks. However if I turn 5 into a raid, I’ll have some number of disks capacity -N depending on raid level. I could then turn the backup set into the same raid level (online backup) to match, but in this case raid gives me less than half the total capacity of all disks due to extra parity storage.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work.

True, however my approach would be to have both online and offline backups. Online ZFS backup should help here. To keep costs down, this is just 3 disks for every dataset zpool I’d set up. Then, an additional 3 disks when that runs out. Add another disk or tape in to this for offsite backup if you want.

Also offline guards against ransomware.

What do you think, what is your approach?

For relatively unimportant stuff I just use RAID. If ransomware wants me to pay for my Factorio saves I can start a new game instead. My more important private stuff is all documents, so I keep an extra printed copy (and for the really important stuff I also keep copies with my relatives in case I lose everything in a fire). For important stuff that I don't need to hide, I use immutable storage on the internet (e.g. git, bittorrent, ipfs). That would be my advice to anyone who wants to hoard books electronically: find a like-minded community, make a torrent with everything you want to hoard, and ask them to seed it.

On the latter point of immutable storage, I’m not convinced we won’t have some sort of on onerous blackout from a “global cybersecurity incident” as defined from the WEF. No route to host, but I want my data. So I do keep hoarding locally.

Do you agree?

Quite possibly. I haven't really given it much thought TBH. I just think digital archival methods don't have a great (or long) track record. Certainly, any one person's efforts wouldn't be likely to survive their death.

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