Paper or Digital?

[DarkNacht]

Sure, and that's what we're saying: highly efficient with much less longevity.

Digital data has as much durability as written data as it can use the same mediums.

[Mr_Bellflower]

Paper. Easier to burn and not resurface for illegal activities that require black books. By the time you are done scrubbing your drives with neodymium magnets I'll be on my way to Cuba. The only time burning paper ***** up is when an idiot does it.

Well, since you asked... in-flight cockpit recorders do survive extremely hard impacts and explosions, as well as very intense fires.

Run by me again why everyone would have a home-storage-data-bin that can damn well take the impact of a small artillery shell? Despite how funny it would be to have one laying around your bones when the nuclear holocaust happens, it is kind of inconvenient for everyone to spend a few grand on. Though at least we would know what porn the person was surfing before their home exploded. : )

[DarkNacht]

Paper. Easier to burn and not resurface for illegal activities that require black books. By the time you are done scrubbing your drives with neodymium magnets I'll be on my way to Cuba. The only time burning paper ***** up is when an idiot does it.

Burn, who has time for that? Besides burning large amounts of data leaves evidence, not of what you burnt but still that you were burning something. Its much easier to just flush or swallow a micro storage device.

[Kandarim]

I'd like to point out that twenty years ago the CD was hailed as a great new way of storage, but by now it's abundantly clear that they age very badly. That's even worse for flash drives and other soft state storage. I think the only exception is tape records, which can be stored well enough provided you don't actually look at them. The fact that I could go into the city hall in my town and request documents from the 1700-1800's demonstrates that electronic(al) storage is hardly mature yet

Since this derail isn't ending, it's gets it's own topic. And as the initiator of the derail, Kandarim may rename it if he likes.

sure, pin it all on me

[grapefruitv]

But did humanity lost anything important (and note I say humanity, your 15th birthday pictures isn't really a concern of earthlings) due to CD corruption? Nope, because it is easy, fast and cheap to make an unlimited amount of copies. Paper didn't do us that favor, many things were lost through out history, especially before printing. Today average home PC contains (or has potential capacity to do that) more information than average library holds on paper (don't forget there are also films and digital books too though). I have hundreds of thousands of books on a tiny hdd and that takes less than 1% of total storage potential I have, while my paper library takes a lot of space, contains few hundreds of books, only 20-30 of which have any value for future generations, and can't be copied in any reasonable way. Yes, modern storage devices come and go very fast, but this is a gradual process and they don't disappear with all the data in a blink of an eye and can be copied to new and better devices in a time span of that blink.
Any of that doesn't really mean that paper has to go away completely, safest way to keep information is using as many alternative storages as we can get after all. Calligraphy as an art doesn't go anywhere either, electronic devices actually gave it whole new life and it is not just weird people playing with their pens anymore, today it is an important branch of design. But making kids in first world schools use paper is nothing more than sadism and unproductivity and I can't get why anyone would mourn that.

[MagicManICT]

But did humanity lost anything important (and note I say humanity, your 15th birthday pictures isn't really a concern of earthlings) due to CD corruption?

How can we even possibly know this? Recording anything other than via handwriting has been around only a bit more than 100 years. Optical recording means have only been around a bit more than 30. (And there are more permanent storage mediums than CDs.)

If we have a purely digital archive, technology could be lost a very long time and would require the reinvention of the digital computer before it could be accessed. With print, if civilization were to take a nose dive back into the dark ages or worse, iron age, there would be enough information to allow the redevelopment of civilization in a fairly rapid time frame. This is, of course, assuming that whatever actions put us there in the first place didn't completely wipe out life on our blue and green rock. We'd then be another couple billion years while intelligent life reemerged. Would those CDs and such still exist to even be read, or just turned into a reserve of oil for the next intelligence to utilize on a path of global destruction?

[trungdle]

Then again, paper is nowhere near digital level of recording. I mean, how can you record sounds and videos with paper? Paper lost it there.
Still, we clearly see that it is the more durable form of recording.

[loftar]

Then again, paper is nowhere near digital level of recording. I mean, how can you record sounds and videos with paper? Paper lost it there.

[DarkNacht]

Then again, paper is nowhere near digital level of recording. I mean, how can you record sounds and videos with paper? Paper lost it there.

That is also digital.

[trungdle]

Ah, QR, that extra-marriage child of paper and digital is doomed at its birth.
Don't mention it.