With the ongoing move to all-digital, our generation will leave less information to future historians than anyone before us who used books, parchment, clay or stone to communicate.

@hypolite im not so sure thats true. I mean a lot of data will still get lost but we are coming up with archival backup methods that last long periods of time too, so we may just find out that more is saved.

@freemo What kind of archival backup methods?

@hypolite well depends on just how next-gen you want to get.One I remember reading about a while back that had an almost infinite life was bits basically burned into crystals using lasers. But I also saw some dvd-like solutions that claimed would last hundreds of years, not sure if they ever wound up hitting the market.

I havent looked into the topic in some time but I know there were viable solutions on the horizon and some may have even become consumer ready I'm not sure.

@freemo Thank you for the elaboration, if none of these techniques are widely used I rest my case.

@hypolite As I stated before these are technologies that are on the horizon and will likely become widely used in the near future... so yea, its counter to your case in the sense that right now we still use books, so things are still getting preserved that way. By the time books become extinct other methods of long-term data preservation will almost certainly be on the scene, making your point moot.