Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that’s good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.
Digital files have checksums. You literally know when something has changed and you lost information. And then you have error-correction on top.
How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn’t copy it to another one a checksum won’t help you.
And if your vinyl collection catches fire it also gets lost, what’s your point? That’s an argument for preservation of storage media, not for intrinsic benefits of analog.
The analog storage you are referring to from thousands of years ago has degraded substantially since its creation. Yes it’s still useful but I wouldn’t use that as evidence it’s a better medium. Case in point: texts (a digital storage form) from thousands of years ago can be retransacribed to be exact copies of the original (with respect to the knowledge contained within of course) whereas paintings from the Renaissance have changed dramatically due to aging and can never be returned to their original form since the needed data is lost.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad?wprov=sfla1
Yes, you’ll make the argument that the available versions of it are not perfect representations, though that is only because the language and dialect used to produce the work had been lost, the work otherwise remains intact.
Text is a digital format because you have a limited set of characters to represent sounds/syllables. For example: the meaning of the letter ‘B’ doesn’t change if a small piece of the letter is missing or if the letter is slightly tilted, it’s still a ‘B’. If the format was analog, those changes would also change the sound/meaning of the word.
Eh. Archival-grade optical discs stored in near-ideal conditions should have a useful lifespan of 1000+ years. Most of the analog storage media, even under near-ideal conditions, are likely far less than that. Is most of the digital information being stored on archival-grade optical discs? No. Will we be able to read them in 100+ years? Probably also no, since we already can’t access some of the data from the Apollo missions because computer architecture has changed so radically. And that’s probably the biggest single drawback to digital music storage; since the way files are being written and accessed keeps changing, eventually the old standards won’t be supported any more. As it is, there are probably a lot of minidiscs out there that no one can read anymore, since minidisc has gone the way of the dodo and passenger pigeon.
