I think it's more than that. He's specifically talking about how the digital media he has is not being stored- for example some videos were on a private youtube by one of the members, but it got taken down when another member didn't want their photo 'online', and the youtube member then died so the video is lost.
He then says he's not sure datahoarding is the solution... except it's literally the solution. The fire company should have a storage system and all those pics/vids/reports should be stored in it rather than being in all kinds of temporary places like YouTube.
//edit- I think the other issue is he's conflating the two issues- he sees things moving to digital, and things not being stored, and sees them as two halves of the same problem. They're related, but they are NOT the same problem.
The stuff in boxes is stored because someone bothered to save it in boxes. The digital stuff isn't stored because nobody bothered to save it. I say they're related because chances are whoever put the boxes together understands how to select and operate a cardboard box but doesn't understand how to select and operate a NAS (or other digital archive solution).
Thus, nobody was bothering to store the digital records.
By my read, there was no central storage system in his situation. It's not stored, it's just existing wherever it was captured (IE the member who takes the video keeps the video).
I take great care to collect my digital files onto hard drives and I keep multiple backups on multiple sites.
This is a pain but is the only way I see to keep things long term. And I don’t even trust it for more than a few years. Part of “trusting” this media is the belief that data recovery services could help pull info off the hard drive if needed.
And that’s the best there is. As a consumer, I’m never going to trust any kind of cloud service to be there for decades. Companies vanish. Storage policies change.
All removable media is trash. I spent years archiving music and movies by burning DVDs only to find that the instability that allows these discs to be burnable also allows them to degrade rather quickly. You can’t trust them for more than a year or two. By five you should expect them to be corrupted.
Of course my archives are encrypted because they contain personal data including everything you’d need to thoroughly steal my identity and all the photos I’ve ever taken.
If I died tomorrow would anyone have the know how to pull my archives together, get the bare drives installed somewhere, use the right password, and navigate my organization system? I seriously doubt it. Will the media still last for a curious grandchild going through old boxes? I seriously doubt it. As I’ve cultivated this setup I’ve gone through many drives. I have a small stack of them I’ve erased which are waiting to be destroyed. How will anyone even know which drive is the main one and where all my backups are?
Digital media is much more fragile to the whims of time. Zero question about it. Each year my family uses a commercial service to print a “yearbook” containing photos, social media posts, etc. It sits on the shelf easily labeled and found. I don’t know of course how long the paper and ink will last but sitting closed in its hard cover I trust it more for the long haul than anything else.
I agree that an official storage solution would be best. I worked in a field where physical documents had to be kept for 7 years or so (legal requirement) and we had pallets of documents I helped create in long term storage offsite.
The other option was digital in a central repository we controlled. Took years but I finally got that approved. Physical copies for 3 months or so then trashed. Saved money, saved space, less clutter. Still though, like the volunteer firefighter said, a visual physical medium still has merit. There's more weight to it (mentally not just physically).
Hard to replace the yellowing pages of old documents, the feel of the paper over decades as it changes. The smell of history. Tactile experiences cant be replaced with a screen but perhaps a balance could be found. Framed photographs tied to a decade with digital references for more info. Kind of thinking about what to do with my physical media too.
The other option was digital in a central repository we controlled.
This is exactly what that firehouse needs.
Still though, like the volunteer firefighter said, a visual physical medium still has merit.
The firefighter's issue is that he's mixing the two issues together.
Yes with digital there's less 'weight' and less tactile experience of going through it all. But he's conflating that issue with lack of availability of the data.
Fact is, he could be having the same issue with physical files, if someone wasn't collecting and storing them. Someone was collecting them, so they are preserved. Nobody is collecting and storing the digital files in the same manner, so they are being scattered and lost.
That's not an inherent problem with technology. It's a problem that while the way the information is collected changed, the way it's stored and archived did not adapt.
All they really need is a decent NAS box and someone to organize the photos/videos. They could solve this problem with $750 and a few hours of volunteer time. They just haven't thought to do it yet. That's not entirely their fault- we create and consume so much digital data without a second's thought that the idea of reliably preserving it often just doesn't occur to us.
The upload I don't think was intended to save or preserve, but rather to publish them within the fire house so other members could enjoy them.
What's needed is to actually SAVE and PRESERVE them- like to take that data and say 'I want to save this so it will be available to someone 10-20 years from now. How do I do that?'
Maybe that answer is archival grade DVD-R or BD-R. Maybe that answer is hard drives stored in anti static shock boxes. Maybe that answer is an online archive that gets updated and maintained. Maybe that answer is a combination of all above.
The fire company should have a storage system and all those pics/vids/reports should be stored in it rather than being in all kinds of temporary places like YouTube.
The irony was that he had to dig through completely disorganized records to come to his conclusion about how much they've lost without realizing that they likely have lost just as much from the previous 60 years that nobody remembers anymore to know it's gone. The issue is that the fire company doesn't value recordkeeping, not the format the records are kept in.
the fire company doesn't value recordkeeping, not the format the records are kept in.
That's probably quite true.
The old hardcopy records got kept because it was more work to throw them away, and it was a case of 'throw that in the basement, we might need it someday'.
The new digital records get lost because it's more work to keep them, and it's a case of nobody thinks about keeping them.
Ugh, it's extra frustrating because as a publicly funded institution, there are likely laws on data retention?? I am a public employee and every record I create has a retention period.
This feels like a case of "be the change you want to see". he himself can take it upon himself to create a digital repository, or even just printing out the digital media and make physical copys to place into photobooks for people to browse and look through in the fire hall.
Because it's 7 paragraphs and for whatever reason there are a shitload of people who think everything has to be wordy as fuck like some sort of college research paper assignment.
why are you on this subreddit? It's for well written, well thought out posts?
Comments submitted here should be of significant length and be descriptive and analytical. They should reflect the best that reddit has to offer. Short comments, gotcha's, calling out others, incorrect statements, and celebrity comments not meeting the above criteria are all subject to mod removal.
Yeah you don't have the time to read an interesting thought from an old man, but you have the time to leave a worthless comment.
Ironically, that's part of what the firefighter is saying; we don't take the time to do things properly now. Everything has to be consumed fast and into the bin to make room for the next consumer.
The writer is writing for a specific community and that's fine for that community. For the general population, that type of writing isn't helpful if you are not naturally interested in the topic. Journalists use (or used to use...) an inverted pyramid for a reason. There are a lot of stories and you need to get to the point to respect your reader's time. Unless you are writing fiction where nuance and subtext are important to the story, or building suspense for a big reveal, writing needs to be clear and concise.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be an expert writer. I'm not. Mistakes are fine. We aren't all beholden to some professional editor, but the general idea of respecting your reader should be at the forefront of all your writing, regardless of media. Using a click-bait title and burying your lede are clear signs that they don't.
Yeah, this old man is doing his best and imitating what he sees on social media. It's good for people to try and open themselves though.
He is just not that knowledgeable, and has not considered any of your points, even if they are completely valid. Anyway, thanks for your respectful and well articulatednresponse and have a nice weekend.
Because the title is click bait. If it were written in a way that respects the readers time, then no click would have to be saved. They could have easily written something like: A volunteer firefighter organizes 80 years of their fire company's history and finds the true value of physical media. Something like that hints at the conclusion and if it were a topic I was interested in, then I'd read the post.
It's supposed to both summarize the story and encourage people to read it. Not leave out information intentionally to force you to read the story to get the point.
And then the inverter pyramid format puts other salient information at the top of the story and provides more background and supporting information later.
Oh, sorry, my comment made more sense when there were just the two comments.
The comment linked is a lovely and poignant story about how important it is to have the physical presence of historical artifacts that a person can sit down and have the experience of exploring.
The comment I was reacting to, the one saying "digital media isn't physical, saved you a click" almost completely misunderstood the point of the content they dismissed. Like - the entire perspective of the comment "digital media isn't physical, saved you a click" is essentially precisely what OOP was warning against.
Some things are worth taking the time to read and understand. There is value in doing the opposite of looking for a brief and artless summary.
This is why I curate and print my pictures. Not all of them, just random ones, and I still exchange them digitally. I put them up in my office and rotate them. Sure, they'll end up in a box someday. But it'll be a fun box for someone to find. And they make me happy to see now.
Same! I have a premium slide scanner and a dye sublimation printer. That said, I've digitized slides from 20-80 years ago and sent digital albums to family. I have some of the original prints, but many are in poor shape. I've scanned in thousands and my grandma loves to browse them. I have everything cataloged digitally, and I can easily create a book on each topic, like Christmases at Grandma's, etc.
Funny enough, it's photos I take with my phone that I tend to print. I'll go to parties or host parties and get photos of my peeps with their kids, then print them off so they can hang them on the fridge. I use a portable Leine printer.
people LOVE printed pics, especially now. When I see my nieces I print out like 30 wallet sized pictures of family stuff so they can have "cousin trading cards". They are like 4-6, they love that shit, and then my mom and their parents are like whoa wait you got extras of this one or that one?
The honest answer is that it doesn't matter either way because in 100 years, no one is going to want the stuff anyway even if it was physical. Grandma dies, the house FULL of history and things, who is going to keep it? Am I keeping grandmas stuff and then when I die my grandkids are going to care about some pictures of people they've never really head about? Even that fire department, who is it all being saved for? In 3-4 generations no one will have any idea about that and isn't going to care about a fire that happened 100 years ago.
This is similar to how the Iliad and Odyssey are 2 of a 5 part series, but the other 3 stories have been lost to history - with one hypothesis being that they were lost because they weren't very good so weren't passed down.
There are probably millions of things that have been lost to history over time. It feels like it's only in the last 100 years (probably less), that this desire of saving everything has happened because it became possible due to a higher standard of living for the average person. If you have to farm, or work, from sun up to sun down everyday, you don't care about preserving the history because you're just trying not to die. Society is only starting to reckon with what to do when you can save EVERYTHING either physically or digitally. I have 23,000 photos on my computer. What the hell is anyone going to ever do with that? They don't need preserved, they're for me and my memories and thats okay.
I work in IT and once got a call from a client that needed help getting into some old files that wouldnt open. This was a construction design firm that had been in operation for 50 years, and about 25ish years ago they had spent tons of time and money digitizing all their old paper plans...thousands of pages of 24x36 blueprints and such. TBs of data that theyd dutifully migrated from one storage solution to another over decades of server upgrades, had replicating so they didnt lost them.
But these were files that hardly ever got touched...how often do you need to review plans for a building that was built 30 years prior? The last modified date on many of these files was from the late 90s, probably when the pdfs were generated.
They received a request from one of their oldest clients for copies of the original plans...they wanted to print some of them back out and frame them for their new offices conference room, which they were planning on decorating with those pictures of their building...sort of a mini museum based around the history of their company. They go to open the files dated sometime in 98 and they dont open. Corrupted. Thats when I got the call.
I spent days using all sorts of nebulous tools to try and get these files to open, but they were just toast. I even stood up an XP machine and hunted up 25+ year old versions of the software (itself no easy feat) to see if that got me anywhere but still no luck. They had TBs of these files, decades of their digitized work, and none of them would open.
Turns out the second part of a backup...verifying data integrity...that was never done. They worked 25 years ago, they assured me of that and I had no reason to doubt them, but somewhere along the however many robocopies from one host to another, they got cooked...the files were moved, they looked at the folders and saw them there after their server upgrades over the years, but of course never tried to open any of them. "We have backups, though! Can't we just restore the originals?" Thats when I had to explain that the corruption could have happened 25 years ago...and even going back to some ancient tape backups they had in storage (playing with tape backups in the 2020s was wild lol, i needed to tag in one of our greybeards for help with that), what few early 00s era tapes still worked at all, files were still corrupted.
So they have basically decades of work just gone forever. They were quite upset, but there was just nothing to be done. The original paper copies were long since shredded...that was the whole point of digitizing them, of course.
I have a feeling there are lots and lots of business out there in the same boat that have no idea. How many gigs and gigs of data theyre storing that is just a bunch of useless ones and zeroes on spinning rust.
When I was a kid my dad lost all his pictures in a fire. They are in a storage unit while we were moving. Years later a friend wanted to digitalize her parents picture. She took them to her house, and while she had them, her parents house burned down.
Physical copies of picture and old documents are so much better to browse though than digital ones. But they are so bulky, and vulnerable, and as OP noted, hard to go through if not organized.
My mom passed away several years ago. About a year ago I was at my sister house and ran across 20 three-ring binders. I started looking at them I realized they were scrapbook my mom had started making before she passed. The picture were out of order, and there were a lot of duplicates. But there were also pictures I'd never seen. There were pictures from decades ago of family events I'd forgotten about, and loved ones who had passed away.
I borrowed the scrapbooks, bought a scanner and started to digitalize them. .
At first I tried to organize as I scanned, but eventually I realized I was never going to finish if I tried to track down the right date of every picture. Instead I'm scanning them, getting them burned to DVD, and keeping a copy on an external hard drive. It will be someone else job to organize the digital copies.
DVDs are so small for the info they hold. I thought my whole family would want copies. They are really excited when I show them the pictures I've digitized, but none of them want DVDs. I've pressures my sister to keep a set at her house because I'm so paranoid of having all the copies in one location. I am also backing them up to the cloud, but I've also heard horror stories of accounts being suspended and people losing all their data.
BTW: buy archive quality DVDs. More pricey, but worth it to not have your DVD fall apart in 10 years.
I guess what I'm saying is that data hording is the only way.
Everything OP was rummaging through could probably fit in a shoebox if it was digital. someone needs to be grabbing pictures from today and saving them off somewhere. I also agree with other comments that printing off select picture (and documents) is a good idea.
One of my close friends is a historian. So much of what we know of history comes from letters written between i.portant figures in their fields.
The letters ore often private in their time, but released after the people involved are no longer with us. The move to digital may affect our access to important sources of information.
This is why we should just carve out history into stone like the Romans and Egyptians. 2 to 4 thousand years from now data and papers will long have disintegrated, but people will still be about to find us and know our history.
Rome actually largely put their history onto papyrus, and the vast bulk of it was lost to time. We do still have a fair amount, most of which was copied by hand years after the fact, often many times over. A ton was lost, though, there are parts of history where chunks of what we know comes from library indexes that survived, even though we no longer have most of the books they referenced. One of the most famous Roman military manuals (De re militari) was basically just a consolidation of advice from a whole bunch of earlier books on strategy that no longer survive.
That said, I very much agree with you about putting history to stone. One of my big "if I ever came into serious money" projects that I fantasize about is an effort to put a "good enough" historical account onto stone or ceramic or something else that would be human readable tens of thousands of years into the future. Then make a bunch of copies and distribute them throughout the world - some buried, some on exhibit for people to view - so that at least part of our current understanding would make it into the deeper future.
Physical media fades. The only reason half of the stuff he found was still legible is because it was in a box, out of sunlight, not being touched.
Most of it is going to be ruined within a year now that he's messing with it.
Meanwhile I still enjoy pictures I took decades ago, because I'm not an idiot and transfer them to different hard drives every so often. I also share them with people.
"And today, I sat there with all that stuff, and felt sad. Because the digitization of everything is erasing our ability to leave behind our history for others to discover it on their own, without needing to know where to look or how to access it.
Data hides the past in an ever-shifting sea of media and formats, while physical media is the past embodied.
We're losing so much, and I fear data hording isn't the solution."
You are missing part of his point, and you are disrespectful by calling him an "idiot". You are the idiot buddy. I don't get why you guys get defensive about this digital Vs analogical stuff.
Also, you act defensive because you called him an idiot without even fully understanding what he was trying to say. I already explained it in the previous comment.
Lashing out to the person instead of the message is a typical way of "defending" our ego.
Not to mention that we only have the ability to fully archive a lot of these things through digital records. Yeah in the past you might have had a stack of newspapers and photos, but it's digitization that allows it to become something practical to browse and search. In the past you might have personally had a record of an event, but sharing it with others was cumbersome if not impossible.
The issue here isn't digital records, it's not adapting to them. It's expecting there to be a pile of physical junk to sort through later, instead of creating a record now.
But that's not entirely the point. Both things should coexist, there is a place and time for each thing. Analogical, tangible stuff is better for human connection, and it takes more dedication and effort, which is also good.
Many digital stuff gets muddled and disappears too. The internet is oversaturated and it will only get worse.
If the issue isn't digital records, he shouldn't have spent half the post whining about them.
the 2021-today table having no printed photos at all. Yes, we still take photos & videos of incidents and events, but they get sent phone-to-phone, they get posted on social media, and then...after a while, they vanish into the ether. Members come and go, they take their files with them. I was on a major fire call in 2022, it was huge, it was complex, there was drama. We have no physical photos of the event.
Maybe actually read the post before running your mouth. Idiot.
He realized that in the age of digital media, we have less physical media. I hope that saves you a click.
I think it's more than that. He's specifically talking about how the digital media he has is not being stored- for example some videos were on a private youtube by one of the members, but it got taken down when another member didn't want their photo 'online', and the youtube member then died so the video is lost.
He then says he's not sure datahoarding is the solution... except it's literally the solution. The fire company should have a storage system and all those pics/vids/reports should be stored in it rather than being in all kinds of temporary places like YouTube.
//edit- I think the other issue is he's conflating the two issues- he sees things moving to digital, and things not being stored, and sees them as two halves of the same problem. They're related, but they are NOT the same problem.
The stuff in boxes is stored because someone bothered to save it in boxes. The digital stuff isn't stored because nobody bothered to save it. I say they're related because chances are whoever put the boxes together understands how to select and operate a cardboard box but doesn't understand how to select and operate a NAS (or other digital archive solution).
Thus, nobody was bothering to store the digital records.
It is stored though, nobody is just taking the time to curate them for long term storage in a firehouse. Totally could if they wanted though.
Posting it online isnt the same as storing it.
By my read, there was no central storage system in his situation. It's not stored, it's just existing wherever it was captured (IE the member who takes the video keeps the video).
I take great care to collect my digital files onto hard drives and I keep multiple backups on multiple sites.
This is a pain but is the only way I see to keep things long term. And I don’t even trust it for more than a few years. Part of “trusting” this media is the belief that data recovery services could help pull info off the hard drive if needed.
And that’s the best there is. As a consumer, I’m never going to trust any kind of cloud service to be there for decades. Companies vanish. Storage policies change.
All removable media is trash. I spent years archiving music and movies by burning DVDs only to find that the instability that allows these discs to be burnable also allows them to degrade rather quickly. You can’t trust them for more than a year or two. By five you should expect them to be corrupted.
Of course my archives are encrypted because they contain personal data including everything you’d need to thoroughly steal my identity and all the photos I’ve ever taken.
If I died tomorrow would anyone have the know how to pull my archives together, get the bare drives installed somewhere, use the right password, and navigate my organization system? I seriously doubt it. Will the media still last for a curious grandchild going through old boxes? I seriously doubt it. As I’ve cultivated this setup I’ve gone through many drives. I have a small stack of them I’ve erased which are waiting to be destroyed. How will anyone even know which drive is the main one and where all my backups are?
Digital media is much more fragile to the whims of time. Zero question about it. Each year my family uses a commercial service to print a “yearbook” containing photos, social media posts, etc. It sits on the shelf easily labeled and found. I don’t know of course how long the paper and ink will last but sitting closed in its hard cover I trust it more for the long haul than anything else.
This is the way.
It's that adage 1 is none and 2 is 1. 3 backups minimum for stuff you really wanna keep.
I agree that an official storage solution would be best. I worked in a field where physical documents had to be kept for 7 years or so (legal requirement) and we had pallets of documents I helped create in long term storage offsite.
The other option was digital in a central repository we controlled. Took years but I finally got that approved. Physical copies for 3 months or so then trashed. Saved money, saved space, less clutter. Still though, like the volunteer firefighter said, a visual physical medium still has merit. There's more weight to it (mentally not just physically).
Hard to replace the yellowing pages of old documents, the feel of the paper over decades as it changes. The smell of history. Tactile experiences cant be replaced with a screen but perhaps a balance could be found. Framed photographs tied to a decade with digital references for more info. Kind of thinking about what to do with my physical media too.
This is exactly what that firehouse needs.
The firefighter's issue is that he's mixing the two issues together.
Yes with digital there's less 'weight' and less tactile experience of going through it all. But he's conflating that issue with lack of availability of the data.
Fact is, he could be having the same issue with physical files, if someone wasn't collecting and storing them. Someone was collecting them, so they are preserved. Nobody is collecting and storing the digital files in the same manner, so they are being scattered and lost.
That's not an inherent problem with technology. It's a problem that while the way the information is collected changed, the way it's stored and archived did not adapt.
All they really need is a decent NAS box and someone to organize the photos/videos. They could solve this problem with $750 and a few hours of volunteer time. They just haven't thought to do it yet. That's not entirely their fault- we create and consume so much digital data without a second's thought that the idea of reliably preserving it often just doesn't occur to us.
Yeah, uploading them to youtube was not really saving or preserving them, even if it looks like it is.
If you're at the whims of big and stupid tech companies, you're not saving anything.
Redundant backups is what's needed, but to be fair that's hard.
The upload I don't think was intended to save or preserve, but rather to publish them within the fire house so other members could enjoy them.
What's needed is to actually SAVE and PRESERVE them- like to take that data and say 'I want to save this so it will be available to someone 10-20 years from now. How do I do that?'
Maybe that answer is archival grade DVD-R or BD-R. Maybe that answer is hard drives stored in anti static shock boxes. Maybe that answer is an online archive that gets updated and maintained. Maybe that answer is a combination of all above.
Youtube certainly ain't it.
The irony was that he had to dig through completely disorganized records to come to his conclusion about how much they've lost without realizing that they likely have lost just as much from the previous 60 years that nobody remembers anymore to know it's gone. The issue is that the fire company doesn't value recordkeeping, not the format the records are kept in.
Not to mention that digital records if properly maintained could last basically forever.
That's probably quite true.
The old hardcopy records got kept because it was more work to throw them away, and it was a case of 'throw that in the basement, we might need it someday'.
The new digital records get lost because it's more work to keep them, and it's a case of nobody thinks about keeping them.
Ugh, it's extra frustrating because as a publicly funded institution, there are likely laws on data retention?? I am a public employee and every record I create has a retention period.
This feels like a case of "be the change you want to see". he himself can take it upon himself to create a digital repository, or even just printing out the digital media and make physical copys to place into photobooks for people to browse and look through in the fire hall.
Exactly 100%
Even when it is stored, the technology to read it might be so out of date as to be unreadable.
Data hoarding is literally just a different name for saving a box full of photo albums or old VHS tapes.
Picture of box of photo albums and old tapes :D
Sadly it didn't... because I had to upvoter you.
Same energy as "our two sets of footsteps turned to one when I carried you" frissoning season is here
He also didn't say whether or not he found the cookbook.
Maybe they should buy a printer!
Why does a click need to be saved? It's not a kink to some shady ad filled site.
Because it's 7 paragraphs and for whatever reason there are a shitload of people who think everything has to be wordy as fuck like some sort of college research paper assignment.
why are you on this subreddit? It's for well written, well thought out posts?
Trying to hit a word count does not make something more valuable or interesting.
Yes, and this is a subreddit for valuable or interesting posts with a word count?
Yeah you don't have the time to read an interesting thought from an old man, but you have the time to leave a worthless comment.
Ironically, that's part of what the firefighter is saying; we don't take the time to do things properly now. Everything has to be consumed fast and into the bin to make room for the next consumer.
Putting thought and effort into things is good.
The writer is writing for a specific community and that's fine for that community. For the general population, that type of writing isn't helpful if you are not naturally interested in the topic. Journalists use (or used to use...) an inverted pyramid for a reason. There are a lot of stories and you need to get to the point to respect your reader's time. Unless you are writing fiction where nuance and subtext are important to the story, or building suspense for a big reveal, writing needs to be clear and concise.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be an expert writer. I'm not. Mistakes are fine. We aren't all beholden to some professional editor, but the general idea of respecting your reader should be at the forefront of all your writing, regardless of media. Using a click-bait title and burying your lede are clear signs that they don't.
Yeah, this old man is doing his best and imitating what he sees on social media. It's good for people to try and open themselves though.
He is just not that knowledgeable, and has not considered any of your points, even if they are completely valid. Anyway, thanks for your respectful and well articulatednresponse and have a nice weekend.
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Yeah you are right, I "romanticed" him I guess.
Because the title is click bait. If it were written in a way that respects the readers time, then no click would have to be saved. They could have easily written something like: A volunteer firefighter organizes 80 years of their fire company's history and finds the true value of physical media. Something like that hints at the conclusion and if it were a topic I was interested in, then I'd read the post.
Why do Redditors think a headline is supposed to be a TLDR?
It’s supposed to encourage people to read the story.
It's supposed to both summarize the story and encourage people to read it. Not leave out information intentionally to force you to read the story to get the point.
And then the inverter pyramid format puts other salient information at the top of the story and provides more background and supporting information later.
There wasn’t a discovery. An insight was gained.
Cuz they read slow and painfully m, probably. Multiple paragraphs scare the dummies
You are right. Reddit has changed, just like people.
He found a bittersweet way to describe a bittersweet realization about our ephemeral mortality.
I hoped this comment saved you from avoiding taking the time to click the link.
Why are both comments about "saving us the click"? Isn't it the point to read what people have to say?
Do we just want to consume the titular?
What they're saying translates to "This was not worth my time to read, and won't be worth your time either. A disappointment."
Oh, I understand now thanks. People are missing the point though.
Nah. The entire story is the same as when Bender built a giant statue of himself that shouts "Remember me!"
That's not at all what evilbrent said. In fact, the exact opposite.
Oh, sorry, my comment made more sense when there were just the two comments.
The comment linked is a lovely and poignant story about how important it is to have the physical presence of historical artifacts that a person can sit down and have the experience of exploring.
The comment I was reacting to, the one saying "digital media isn't physical, saved you a click" almost completely misunderstood the point of the content they dismissed. Like - the entire perspective of the comment "digital media isn't physical, saved you a click" is essentially precisely what OOP was warning against.
Some things are worth taking the time to read and understand. There is value in doing the opposite of looking for a brief and artless summary.
Thanks for your explanation, I am glad to hear it. Also, I recognise now your name from yesterday, have a nice weekend!
Ha! Small world!
You too :-)
Not when it's clickbait, burying the lead/lede
Just choose one lol
You misread evilbrent's comment. Try again.
This is why I curate and print my pictures. Not all of them, just random ones, and I still exchange them digitally. I put them up in my office and rotate them. Sure, they'll end up in a box someday. But it'll be a fun box for someone to find. And they make me happy to see now.
Same! I have a premium slide scanner and a dye sublimation printer. That said, I've digitized slides from 20-80 years ago and sent digital albums to family. I have some of the original prints, but many are in poor shape. I've scanned in thousands and my grandma loves to browse them. I have everything cataloged digitally, and I can easily create a book on each topic, like Christmases at Grandma's, etc.
Funny enough, it's photos I take with my phone that I tend to print. I'll go to parties or host parties and get photos of my peeps with their kids, then print them off so they can hang them on the fridge. I use a portable Leine printer.
people LOVE printed pics, especially now. When I see my nieces I print out like 30 wallet sized pictures of family stuff so they can have "cousin trading cards". They are like 4-6, they love that shit, and then my mom and their parents are like whoa wait you got extras of this one or that one?
The honest answer is that it doesn't matter either way because in 100 years, no one is going to want the stuff anyway even if it was physical. Grandma dies, the house FULL of history and things, who is going to keep it? Am I keeping grandmas stuff and then when I die my grandkids are going to care about some pictures of people they've never really head about? Even that fire department, who is it all being saved for? In 3-4 generations no one will have any idea about that and isn't going to care about a fire that happened 100 years ago.
This is similar to how the Iliad and Odyssey are 2 of a 5 part series, but the other 3 stories have been lost to history - with one hypothesis being that they were lost because they weren't very good so weren't passed down.
There are probably millions of things that have been lost to history over time. It feels like it's only in the last 100 years (probably less), that this desire of saving everything has happened because it became possible due to a higher standard of living for the average person. If you have to farm, or work, from sun up to sun down everyday, you don't care about preserving the history because you're just trying not to die. Society is only starting to reckon with what to do when you can save EVERYTHING either physically or digitally. I have 23,000 photos on my computer. What the hell is anyone going to ever do with that? They don't need preserved, they're for me and my memories and thats okay.
If a picture/video ids important, then you need to back it up to multiple places where multiple people have access.
I work in IT and once got a call from a client that needed help getting into some old files that wouldnt open. This was a construction design firm that had been in operation for 50 years, and about 25ish years ago they had spent tons of time and money digitizing all their old paper plans...thousands of pages of 24x36 blueprints and such. TBs of data that theyd dutifully migrated from one storage solution to another over decades of server upgrades, had replicating so they didnt lost them.
But these were files that hardly ever got touched...how often do you need to review plans for a building that was built 30 years prior? The last modified date on many of these files was from the late 90s, probably when the pdfs were generated.
They received a request from one of their oldest clients for copies of the original plans...they wanted to print some of them back out and frame them for their new offices conference room, which they were planning on decorating with those pictures of their building...sort of a mini museum based around the history of their company. They go to open the files dated sometime in 98 and they dont open. Corrupted. Thats when I got the call.
I spent days using all sorts of nebulous tools to try and get these files to open, but they were just toast. I even stood up an XP machine and hunted up 25+ year old versions of the software (itself no easy feat) to see if that got me anywhere but still no luck. They had TBs of these files, decades of their digitized work, and none of them would open.
Turns out the second part of a backup...verifying data integrity...that was never done. They worked 25 years ago, they assured me of that and I had no reason to doubt them, but somewhere along the however many robocopies from one host to another, they got cooked...the files were moved, they looked at the folders and saw them there after their server upgrades over the years, but of course never tried to open any of them. "We have backups, though! Can't we just restore the originals?" Thats when I had to explain that the corruption could have happened 25 years ago...and even going back to some ancient tape backups they had in storage (playing with tape backups in the 2020s was wild lol, i needed to tag in one of our greybeards for help with that), what few early 00s era tapes still worked at all, files were still corrupted.
So they have basically decades of work just gone forever. They were quite upset, but there was just nothing to be done. The original paper copies were long since shredded...that was the whole point of digitizing them, of course.
I have a feeling there are lots and lots of business out there in the same boat that have no idea. How many gigs and gigs of data theyre storing that is just a bunch of useless ones and zeroes on spinning rust.
TEST YOUR DAMN BACKUPS, PEOPLE!
When I was a kid my dad lost all his pictures in a fire. They are in a storage unit while we were moving. Years later a friend wanted to digitalize her parents picture. She took them to her house, and while she had them, her parents house burned down.
Physical copies of picture and old documents are so much better to browse though than digital ones. But they are so bulky, and vulnerable, and as OP noted, hard to go through if not organized.
My mom passed away several years ago. About a year ago I was at my sister house and ran across 20 three-ring binders. I started looking at them I realized they were scrapbook my mom had started making before she passed. The picture were out of order, and there were a lot of duplicates. But there were also pictures I'd never seen. There were pictures from decades ago of family events I'd forgotten about, and loved ones who had passed away.
I borrowed the scrapbooks, bought a scanner and started to digitalize them. .
At first I tried to organize as I scanned, but eventually I realized I was never going to finish if I tried to track down the right date of every picture. Instead I'm scanning them, getting them burned to DVD, and keeping a copy on an external hard drive. It will be someone else job to organize the digital copies.
DVDs are so small for the info they hold. I thought my whole family would want copies. They are really excited when I show them the pictures I've digitized, but none of them want DVDs. I've pressures my sister to keep a set at her house because I'm so paranoid of having all the copies in one location. I am also backing them up to the cloud, but I've also heard horror stories of accounts being suspended and people losing all their data.
BTW: buy archive quality DVDs. More pricey, but worth it to not have your DVD fall apart in 10 years.
I guess what I'm saying is that data hording is the only way.
Everything OP was rummaging through could probably fit in a shoebox if it was digital. someone needs to be grabbing pictures from today and saving them off somewhere. I also agree with other comments that printing off select picture (and documents) is a good idea.
One of my close friends is a historian. So much of what we know of history comes from letters written between i.portant figures in their fields.
The letters ore often private in their time, but released after the people involved are no longer with us. The move to digital may affect our access to important sources of information.
This is why we should just carve out history into stone like the Romans and Egyptians. 2 to 4 thousand years from now data and papers will long have disintegrated, but people will still be about to find us and know our history.
Then bury it under tons of sand to protect the carving from the elements.
Rome actually largely put their history onto papyrus, and the vast bulk of it was lost to time. We do still have a fair amount, most of which was copied by hand years after the fact, often many times over. A ton was lost, though, there are parts of history where chunks of what we know comes from library indexes that survived, even though we no longer have most of the books they referenced. One of the most famous Roman military manuals (De re militari) was basically just a consolidation of advice from a whole bunch of earlier books on strategy that no longer survive.
That said, I very much agree with you about putting history to stone. One of my big "if I ever came into serious money" projects that I fantasize about is an effort to put a "good enough" historical account onto stone or ceramic or something else that would be human readable tens of thousands of years into the future. Then make a bunch of copies and distribute them throughout the world - some buried, some on exhibit for people to view - so that at least part of our current understanding would make it into the deeper future.
What I was picturing was how people in Rome would basically put their life story on their gravestones. Just a treasure trove of history served up.
Unless, like with the Georgia Guidestones, they get blown up by some deranged idiot.
I run our company archive. -Physical items are everywhere from 1930ish to 2005 ish
After that its hunting down thing like printouts stuffed into cracks or books under the floorboards
Physical media fades. The only reason half of the stuff he found was still legible is because it was in a box, out of sunlight, not being touched.
Most of it is going to be ruined within a year now that he's messing with it.
Meanwhile I still enjoy pictures I took decades ago, because I'm not an idiot and transfer them to different hard drives every so often. I also share them with people.
That guy is kind of an idiot.
You are missing part of his point, and you are disrespectful by calling him an "idiot". You are the idiot buddy. I don't get why you guys get defensive about this digital Vs analogical stuff.
I know, right? Both are useful.
I don't get why you think I'm being "defensive" for calling out his bullshit.
Also, you act defensive because you called him an idiot without even fully understanding what he was trying to say. I already explained it in the previous comment.
Lashing out to the person instead of the message is a typical way of "defending" our ego.
Not to mention that we only have the ability to fully archive a lot of these things through digital records. Yeah in the past you might have had a stack of newspapers and photos, but it's digitization that allows it to become something practical to browse and search. In the past you might have personally had a record of an event, but sharing it with others was cumbersome if not impossible.
The issue here isn't digital records, it's not adapting to them. It's expecting there to be a pile of physical junk to sort through later, instead of creating a record now.
But that's not entirely the point. Both things should coexist, there is a place and time for each thing. Analogical, tangible stuff is better for human connection, and it takes more dedication and effort, which is also good.
Many digital stuff gets muddled and disappears too. The internet is oversaturated and it will only get worse.
If the issue isn't digital records, he shouldn't have spent half the post whining about them.
Maybe actually read the post before running your mouth. Idiot.
Hostile much? Get a hobby.
That’s my entire point. He spends time complaining about something that isn’t the problem. I’m saying he’s wrong.