# I Wonder If These Posts And Our Legecy Will Be Forever?



## countryguy (Aug 21, 2015)

Too many Sci-Fi's I know.... But with all the Net activity on this planet.  The human social experiment is on!       Are we posting here for an eternity?    Will someone from a planet far from Earth read this and laugh histerically some day while they study early Web social history 323 ?    Can the data ever be wiped, lost, or seized?  Crazy stuff.     Ok,  time to power up the toys.


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## mzayd3 (Aug 21, 2015)

Hopefully the technology will change.  Much like 8 mm hopefully my threads will not be converted!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## Bill Gruby (Aug 21, 2015)

There is only one constant in this life and that is "change" because it never stops happening. Sometimes it's good other times not so good. We are human and humans adapt.

 "Billy G"


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## Ed of all trades (Aug 22, 2015)

Do you think the net will go the way of 8 track tapes?


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## CluelessNewB (Aug 22, 2015)

There is the "Wayback" machine (http://web.archive.org) that retains older copies of web pages.  It's not perfect but you can find some older stuff from deleted web pages.


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## higgite (Aug 22, 2015)

Aliens from a galaxy far, far away will stumble across our internet in their search for intelligent life on a planet other than their own... and will move on.


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## Andre (Aug 22, 2015)

Wayback machine has a lot of pages saved, however it does have a lot of the net not mapped. I'm not sure but I doubt it records any of the TOR network for instance.

Everything can be deleted and destroyed, the hard part is finding out who still has a copy of that data.

The internet as we know it will not last forever.


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## kvt (Aug 22, 2015)

No the internet will prob not last in the current state.   Think of the 8 Track,   I think it has already outlasted that,   Beta, VHS tapes,   and all the other forms that have come and pretty much gone.   However some people are still hanging on to them.   But they cannot hang onto everything.   But who knows what the big guys do with all the data they collect,   or how long it will last,    I think I read the Google lost a bunch of the stuff they had saved recently, prob for the best.


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## Karl_T (Aug 22, 2015)

Andre said:


> Everything can be deleted and destroyed, the hard part is finding out who still has a copy of that data.
> 
> The internet as we know it will not last forever.



I've already seen too much stuff get lost. Forums, like this one, seem to have a finite life. In the 90s Usenet was the rage, then came Yahoo groups, now its managed forums like this one.

The take home message (to myself) is top make hard copy backups of ANYTHING that might be needed in the future. I have many gigs of data. The key, and hard part, is keeping it indexed. Also the file formats keep changing. Not only software, hard to open wordstar and lotus123 files today, but also hardware. Where do you go to open a 5.25 floppy disk data?


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## Andre (Aug 22, 2015)

Saving hard copies of things is not only a pain to categorize, but becomes expensive. Good hard drives are about $50, and thumb drives get lost....


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## savarin (Aug 22, 2015)

I have been online since the very early days of bulletin boards.
All my early stuff has gone, even my old websites.
The wayback machine is full of gaps, none of my early stuff is on it.
Librarians are already bemoaning the loss of so much information that cannot be read anymore so yes, it will all vanish eventually.


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## barnbwt (Aug 23, 2015)

"Good hard drives are about $50, and thumb drives get lost..."
It's also worth mentioning that neither of these are very good long-term storage solutions, either.  Ever play any really, really old VHS family movies/etc.?  Magnetic media eventually degausses and erases itself, and flash storage has a similar issue with electrical charge gradually depleting to the point it is no longer readable.  Heck, even 'live,' frequently accessed and defragged/backed up digital info isn't safe; I've noticed a distinct increase in bad files and general bugs when it comes to the earliest digital music and movie files I ripped to HDD over ten years ago.  I think after enough "reads," defrags, and copies to backup, 1's and 0's eventually start getting flipped.

Quality vinyl, film, and acid-free paper remain the gold standards (you could probably start an entire hobby simply compiling the useful tidbits on here from the chaff into a hard-copy record, though).


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## GSPatton (Aug 23, 2015)

There are a bunch of posts I made to a newsgroup in 1998 that are still online, I imagine they will be for eternity.


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## mcostello (Aug 23, 2015)

We can only hope They take up metal turning instead of "probing those funny humans."


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## RJSakowski (Aug 23, 2015)

higgite said:


> Aliens from a galaxy far, far away will stumble across our internet in their search for intelligent life on a planet other than their own... and will move on.


Recently, it was reported that an Earth-like planet had been spotted some 1400 light years from Earth and some speculated about beings on that planet looking back at us.  What most people fail to realize is that the light from that originated at a time when the Earth was experiencing the dark ages.  At that time on Earth, the artificial light came from campfires, torches, and the like.

In a galaxy far, far away, if they could see what happens on Earth, they are probably looking at dinosaurs.


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## higgite (Aug 23, 2015)

RJSakowski said:


> In a galaxy far, far away, if they could see what happens on Earth, they are probably looking at dinosaurs.



True, if they are looking from their galaxy far, far away, but not if they're looking from somewhere in New Mexico as we type.  

Tom


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## wachuko (Aug 24, 2015)

As already mentioned... the question is "Will we have the devices to be able to read all the media we have stored?"  Similar to the example of the 5.5 or 3.5 floppy disks... or the iOmega backup devices (remember those??)

I have a 5 disk (20T of space) on a raid system... and I still backup the critical stuff.  That is photos and documents mainly, since the music can be recovered from the hundreds of original CDs in storage (if those have not gone bad, lol )...

So I think that the internet will continue forever... but the content, depending on where it is stored, and how it is moved/restored/refresh will determine what survives and what just disappears with the years...


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