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Comment by drdrey

1 day ago

fires? floods? documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed?

Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.

  • Documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed is common in some places (owing to corruption or what). "Local in scope" but rampant. Digitization has been a panacea as there is more control over the records, but now more prone to hacking.

  • There have been plenty of instances of paper-based land registries being wiped out. It's just usually a very local problem because paper lends itself more to decentralized storage

    • Yes, so quite limited in scope. We have no experience with storing and keeping accessible electronic records for hundreds of years, though, but we know already that accessing old storage media and formats isn't necessarily easy.

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