Century-Scale Storage
December 31, 2024 at 04:30PMThis deeply researched and thoughtful read by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, a fellow at the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, explores the past, present, and future of long-term data storage. “If you want to store something for 100 years, what are the best methods for ensuring its survival?” he asks. Neely-Cohen’s sweeping examination of storage types covers hard drives, removable media like VHS tapes and DVDs, the cloud, and even physical surfaces like rocks and walls. The piece also interrogates whether decentralization is the right direction, and what systems, ultimately, will inspire care, maintenance, and the preservation of human civilization’s culture and history in the decades and centuries to come.
Every time I’ve spoken to a gallery guard at an art museum, I’ve found that they hold a deep sense of reverence and responsibility for the collections under their watch. This has been repeatedly reflected in both journalism covering the people with these jobs and their own accounts. They stand there, day after day, dealing with entitled tourists, escaped toddlers, food smugglers, hyped-up school groups, and some of the more annoying varieties of possible human behaviors, and they don’t seem to lose a sense of the importance of their work. Even when the institutions they work for don’t pay them enough, this sense of reverence is retained. Every single day they are doing their best to protect that which is in their care. They feel a sense of duty during their time in those rooms.
I have struggled to find that similar sense of duty and reverence when interviewing big tech employees working on storage products, but there is no reason it could not exist. I’ve certainly observed their desire to care for the personal, the sense that they should make something that works so people don’t lose their treasured memories. They also strive for reliability on behalf of customers that are businesses, understanding that a donut shop needs their accounting records to work or they might shut down. But outside of a rare moment of marketing and a few moments of rhetoric, I feel comfortable generalizing that a culture of stewardship, a sense of the stakes, is not widespread within technology companies, nor building it a priority.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/31/century-scale-storage/
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