Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland di'mond executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are yet. You know, I thought it might be interesting to talk about how data can both be easy to lose and hard to lose. It's a paradise, but really this is all about the media upon which we store data and how that media can pose various challenges. Now, first up, let's just talk about the concept of obsolescence. So as our technology, our language, our culture, as all these things evolve and we discover new ways to commit information to different types of media, we often leave the older methods behind. And for example, very few people are recording audio to wax cylinders today. For example, you know Thomas Edison did it, but you don't see people doing it now, at least not outside of you know, historical demonstrations and that sort of thing. The days of storing info magnetically onto strips of metal, like we saw at the end of the nineteenth century, that's pretty far behind us too, although magnetic tape is built on the same principle. But before we use tape, we used wire, not that frequently, but it was one of those things that kind of paved the way toward magnetic tape. Now, over time, all media will ultimately go obsolete, either because the stuff we recorded upon has worn out, the actual physical stuff has broken, or because we've lost the ability to retrieve information from that type of media. And that inability to retrieve can range from the technical to just our knowledge of how to do it. So let's take a moment to consider something that is pretty far removed from modern technology unless you watch stargate, and that is hieroglyphs. So thousands of years ago, the people of ancient Egypt developed a writing system that was complicated, to say the least. So our Latin alphabet, the one that we use in English, for example, has twenty six characters write twenty six letters in the alphabet, and hieroglyphs had hundreds of characters, like a thousand or more. Now, some of the characters in ancient Egypt represented basic phonemes. Phonemes are sounds within a language, right, like would be a phoneeme or like these are basic sounds. But other characters in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, they represented entire words, or at least parts of words. Some represented stills, so not necessarily parts of words like you would think, but a syllable that was common in ancient Egypt. But over the millennia, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs faded from Egyptian culture. There were a lot of reasons for this. I mean, the style of writing down information changed from hieroglyphs to like demonic writing, and beyond Also, you had folks like you know, Europeans, like Greeks and Romans, who were invading Egypt and changing things and disrupting Egyptian culture significantly. By the time we got a few centuries into the common era, pretty much no one knew how to read the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt anymore. So we had all this knowledge stored in various places and no way to retrieve that knowledge. It appeared as though we had lost all of it, or that we had, due to some misconceptions, completely miss interpreted that knowledge. So by the time we got into the medieval era, there was this prevailing hypothesis that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were symbolic in meaning, And by that I mean that the images that the Egyptians used were thought of to be direct symbols of whatever the message was. So let's say you had images of a boat and a snake, then you might be led to think that what you're looking at must be an allegorical story about snakes on a boat, possibly starring Samuel L. Jackson. But no, the symbols used weren't meant to represent exactly what they looked like. They represented elements of a language. So, for example, if you want to understand what I'm saying, our letter S looks kind of like a snake, right, but it doesn't mean snake. When you see the letter S, that doesn't mean snake. It could be the beginning of the word snake. Obviously that begins with S, but it could mean anything. It represents the S sound, which is found in lots of words, not just snake. And the hieroglyphs were similar, but no one had a document that matched hieroglyphs to some other known language so that someone could actually decipher the symbols. So it just seemed to be, you know, all these icons that the meaning had been completely lost. But then came Napoleon Ponaparte and his armies invaded Egypt toward the end of the eighteenth century, and in the process the armies happened across something incredibly important, and it would later be called the Rosetta Stone. Now, the Rosetta Stone itself is a type of monument, and there are carvings on the monument that represent an official dynastic decree. The carvings are in three different written languages. So at the base of the monument you have the carving in ancient Greek, above that is Demotic that is an Egyptian language that followed the High language, and at the top are hieroglyphs. And since all three carvings represented the same decree, this gave experts the opportunity to finally begin deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and so began the long process of uncovering lost knowledge. And this was helped by subsequent discoveries of similar decrees, so that we, over time were able to understand what these hieroglyphs actually stood for. We understood that it was a written language that wasn't just purely symbolic. Now, my point in telling the story is that we have to remind ourselves that while we have ways to record knowledge. It would be foolish for us to assume that any way that we use is permanent, because we've got plenty of examples of knowledge being lost in the past, whether it's because people forgot how to access that knowledge, or maybe the knowledge was based in folklore and the people that were the stewards of that knowledge were wiped out or assimilated and the knowledge was lost, or maybe the physical copies, if it was like a written language, maybe the physical copies were lost. And a shout out to the late great Library of Alexandria, which I should add kind of faded away, not just because the famous fire set by Julius Caesar's forces, though that clearly was a catastrophic event, but also there was a long period in which leaders were cracking down on scholars because well, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a lot of knowledge has got to be absolutely deadly, right. But anyway, let's skip ahead to the modern era. So even today we run the risk of losing access to information because we no longer make the stuff, what plays the media that we used in the old days, or at least in many cases, it is getting really tricky to track down the components that can retrieve data from those types of media. Right, you might be able to find old working equipment that can access certain types of stuff that otherwise we no longer can access. But it's rare that you're gonna find someone make a new version of that. It's not impossible. It's not like we've lost all ability to It's just that unless there is a pressing financial benefit to creating that kind of stuff, no one's going to bother to do it. Because you know, it's expensive to produce older types of technologies, and unless there's a financial incentive, no one's going to do it. It's had to say so. There's also the danger that the media we rely upon could wear out and deteriorate over time. So, for example, let's consider celluloid or film. Cinematic film degrades over time, particularly if it's in a hot and moist environment. And you might have heard about some filmmakers storing prints of their movies or masters of their movies in old salt mines such as the one that's below Hutchinson, Kansas in the United States. These subterranean spaces maintain a constant temperature of around sixty eight fahrenheit or twenty celsius, and they have a low humidity somewhere between like forty to forty five percent humidity. Of course, movies are not the only things stored in those minds. That in fact, we got the idea because of the story of the monument men who ended up finding lots of stolen art from various parts of Europe that the Nazis had collected and stored in salt mines. We ended up kind of using the same idea because it's a great way to preserve stuff. If you otherwise, it's in danger of deterioration. Also, we have to acknowledge that while it's a great way to preserve stuff, there's a tragedy here because we're also removing it right from us. You know, we're storing it and we're preserving it, But to what end if you can't access it, then it doesn't really like there's a lot of questions. There are philosophical questions. If you have a priceless work of art stored in assault mind and no one can go there, is it the same as not having it at all. Now, in the case of film, a lot of studios will actually use those master recordings. When they want to do a remastered version of the film they want to release it on say like Blu ray or something, they'll go to the original print that's stored in as salt mine and they'll pull from that. But yeah, there's lots of other stuff besides just film down there, anything that needs a controlled environment in order to stop or at least slow deterioration. Now, magnetic tape is another important storage method, and we've been using magnetic tape as storage since the mid twentieth century, around nineteen fifty one or so, and again the basic principle behind it dates back to the late nineteenth century. That was when we were using magnetic wire. But whether it's real to real tape, or cassettes or VHS tapes, we've relied on this methodology to store all sorts of information, from computer information to music in the case of like the cassette tapes of the eighties nineties or the VHS videotapes, all sorts of info we have committed to magnetic tape, and a lot of companies still rely on magnetic tape for long term storage and backups. When I use long term storage, i'm speaking relatively as we will see now some older forms of magnetic tape are largely obsolete because the devices we'd use to read the data from them are out of production. You might find a working device here or there, but they can be pretty rare, and being mechanical in nature, they will eventually require maintenance or they'll stop working. And when you're talking about this kind of stuff, often you're talking about things that have parts that no one's making anymore, so it becomes very challenging to keep them in good working order because there's a limited supply of components you can use to make replacements when something breaks down. On top of all that, magnetic information itself can degrade over time, actually can degrade really quickly if it's in the presence of a strong magnetic field, which is why as a kid I was told never to bring a magnet close to a computer or computer discs because you could actually corrupt information that's stored on those devices because the magnet would realign the magnetic components that were on this plastic film, or in the case of a computer, a raid on a platter inside the hard disk drive. Now, on average, if stored in decent conditions, magnetic tape typically will retain data from anywhere between ten to twenty years. When stored in prime conditions like in that salt mine, for example, you might stretch it to around thirty years. So magnetic tape can hold on to data for a while, but certainly not indefinitely. It will sooner or later degrade to a point where the information will be corrupted or irretrievable. Now, on a similar note, let's talk floppy disks. So when I was a kid, our Apple two E computer had a five and a quarter inch floppy disk drive. These were not the first floppy disks. There were older ones. There were larger ones. IBM created eight inch floppy disks for example. And the discs that I was familiar with back when I was using the Apple to E were these plastic envelopes, and the envelopes were covering a disc of magnetic film on the inside, and it was on this magnetic disc that you could save and retreat data. And I actually had to look this up because I could not remember it myself. But the original five and a quarter inch floppy disks could hold up to ninety kilobytes of data. That's when they were first created. So that's just ninety kilobytes. But over time, you know, engineers improved the technology. They increased the capacity of floppy discs. Typically, they did this by creating more precise read write heads so they could store data in smaller physical sizes, which meant you could cram more of it onto the same sized disc. They also figured out how to multilayer discs, so that increased storage as well. I think, you know, some discs maxed out at around seven hundred and twenty kilobytes, so significantly more than ninety, but still way less than what we use today. Now I'm going to talk more about floppy disks and other forms of storage and why all these different types have kind of a limited shelf life of one span or another. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and we were talking about floppy discs. Well, my parents write novels, and so my dad's first books, which were written in the early eighties, they were written on that old Apple two E computer, and he would save chapters of his books to floppy discs. Each novel would take up several discs, like I don't know, around a dozen or so, I can't quite remember. I remember we had disk holders that would hold like maybe three of his novels, because that's how many discs would be taken up just by storing chapters onto them. I'm not sure if he actually still owns those floppy discs, but I imagine that even if he does, he doesn't have any way to check and see if the data is still there or not. He would need an Apple to E or an emulator to simulate an Apple to E on another machine. Plus he would have to have a floppy disk drive connected to whatever computer he was using in order to try and read those disks. And floppy disk drives are not completely gone. You can still find them. They are increasingly rare, however, so it's easy to imagine that a day will come when anything stored on discs like that, like my dad's books, will just become lost simply because no one makes the stuff capable of reading it anymore. And the stuff that already exists will eventually break down, and you know, the actual magnetic information on the discs will degrade over time too, just like with magnetic tape. Eventually you'll have some of those magnetic particles move out of alignment. That's going to corrupt your data. I know I keep saying data and data. I know I do that. I don't know why I do that, and I can't predict when it happens. It just does. I apologize for it, though, because I know it drives some of you crazy, and my apologies. It just happens anyway. Those particles will move out of alignment, the information gets corrupted, So yeah, switch to information there, and then you can't retrieve it anymore. So that can happen too. Even if you have a working computer system that could theoretically pull that information off the disc, sometimes the information on the disc itself will become corrupt. Now, we also have to keep in mind that media that we still use today because hardly. I mean, people do still use floppy disks depending on the situation, but it's pretty rare. But even the stuff that we do use today, eventually that's going to become obsolete too. Just a few years ago, compact discs were the go to for data storage, at least for personal computers, though a lot of enterprises would continue to rely on magnetic tape for more long term backups, and compact discs are a type of optical storage, meaning that Rather than using magnetism to align tiny particles on a physical surface, we're using lasers to write and to read from these discs. The information is stored in water called pits and lands, pits being a designated pit in the surface, and lands being the spaces between pits. Though rewriteable CDs actually kind of use foggy and clear sections that are very very tiny, you wouldn't be able to see them with the naked eye. Now, compact discs allow us to create a more dense storage system, so we could put way more information on a single CD than we could with stuff like floppy discs. Now, Unlike cassettes and floppy disks, optical discs are not affected by magnetism. So if you did bring a powerful magnet close to a bunch of floppy disks or cassette tapes or anything that uses magnetic storage, you would scramble the information on there because the powerful magnet would realign the magnetic particles that are on the tape. But optical discs don't have magnetic particles, so they would be immune to that kind of interference. However, this does not mean that optical discs last forever, so there are many layers on a compact disc. Same thing with DVDs and blue rays. By the way, there are several layers involved, and these layers can have chemical reactions in them, and those chemical reactions can cause those layers to degrade over time. So like a CD that's stored in a very humid and warm place, like if people had stored their CDs, their music CDs inside their car and the summer in Georgia, they might find that those CDs don't last that long, like they might last a few seasons, but eventually they degrade, and they will. You know, if you're in a hot and humid environment, then a disc is going to degrade faster, not like instantaneously, but it will start to degrade faster than it would if you stored it in a cooler, dry place. And that outer layer on a CD, that's the clear layer, right, It's protective and it's clear so that a laser can go through it. But sometimes that clear layer can start to rot away and it can leave the reflective layer that's underneath it exposed. And with some CDs, that reflective layer is made up of silver or sometimes a silver compound, and silver when exposed to air will tarnish. The tarnished silver won't reflect a laser properly, and so you start to get errors when you're trying to read information off of that kind of CD. Now, not all CDs were made that way, right, so only some CDs have this particular bronzing issue. In fact, our research group determined that the CDs that really have this specific problem we're all pressed in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, between the years nineteen eighty eight and nineteen nine. That's pretty darn specific. Now. The issue here, though, is that there's really no way to give an average lifespan for a compact disc because there's no such thing as an average compact discs there were there were so many different manufacturing and pressing processes and recording processes that different ones could last a different you know, theoretical maximum amount of time. So we can't really answer the question how long on average will as CD last. I've seen a lot of people suggest five to ten years, some people saying ten to twenty, some people going as far as fifty. I think it really depends on the way the CD was made and what storage facility it's in, Like, is it in a house where it's kept out of sunlight because UV radiation can affect CDs. Is it kept cool and dry, then it's gonna last longer. Is it not handled a lot? Like if it's it's your favorite music CD, and you handle it a lot, then it's going to degrade faster. Again, not instantaneously, and it may not even be noticeable at first, but eventually you might get the things where it starts to skip on a certain track, or it won't even play certain tracks. That will happen over time. And it's a similar story for other optical formats, which include you know, DVDs and Blu ray discs. These two have a limited lifespan, though that lifespan may stretch to as long as a century under ideal conditions. And a century is a long time for a single person, right, I mean, that's that's a significant amount of time. However, if we step outside of a human's lifespan and we look at it from the perspective of a historical account, then one hundred years is not long at all. I mean, imagine for a moment, if you had no access to any information that was recorded before nineteen twenty ten, because all the media that we had used to record info on had fallen apart or was otherwise unusable or inaccessible. That nothing before nineteen twenty two would be knowable apart from what people wrote about those times post nineteen twenty two. That would be crazy, right, But that's the kind of situation we're in when we start looking at digital information. All right, Well, what about we look at like hard drives, hard disk drives and solid state drives, you know, the stuff that's in your computer systems, your smartphones, that kind of thing. What do they have? You know, how long will information last in those? Well, they stored information in different ways. Hard disk drives have one or more platters in them, and each platter has a magnetic coding on it upon which information can be stored. So, just like cassettes and floppy disks and other magnetic storage methods, hard disk drives can be affected by powerful magnetic fields because they too, store information magnetically. Hardness drives have moving parts, so the platters spin quite quickly in fact, and an actuator mechanical arm with a read write quote unquote head on it. This is the bit that either can read the magnetic particles that are stored on a platter, or it can actually exert a magnetic field that aligns the particles. When you're writing information on the platter, it moves across the platter and it starts to retrieve or write information to the disc itself. And because we're talking about moving parts here, stuff can and does wear down over time and use. If it gets a lot of use, it wears out more quickly. Also, it means that you should be gentle when you're moving anything that happens to have a hard disk drive inside of it, because a good whack can damage the delicate parts. If you knock that actuator arm out of alignment, that's a big problem. It's going to be impossible to read or write stuff reliably to that hard disk drive. Now, hard drives don't tend to last very long because of those mechanical parts. I've seen estimates of the life span for hard disk drives lasting somewhere between three to maybe six and a half years, seven years. Some give it a little bit longer, some a little bit shorter. Of course, a hard disk drive can last longer than a decade. But that's you know, if we're looking at typical use and we're looking at the average life span of hard disk drives, we tend to fall in that three to seven year range, So your mileage may vary. It may depend upon how you use your hard disk drive and the setting that you're in. So they will eventually break down. Also, even if they don't break down sooner or later, really later, that magnetic information will start to move out of alignment just naturally. And so even if you were to preserve a hard disk drive perfectly and come back to it in a century, chances are a lot of the information would no longer be accessible because the actual magnetic particles would no longer be in the proper alignment. Solid state drives store information in a totally different way from hard disk drives, So instead of aligning magnetic particles, and SSD stores information through flash memory similar to USB sticks and other types of flash drives. These drives store information using nand flash that's in a n D and that in turn is composed of what are called floating gate transistors. And all of this gets super technical, but let's just kind of imagine it this way. Each floating gate can be either charged, which means it's a zero, or it could be non charged, which means it's a one. So it gets a little bit confusing because we often think of binary with zero being off and one being on. But in this case, zero means that there is a charge in a cell and one means there is no charge in that cell, And a drive is made up of a grid of these cells. So USB flash drives and SSDs are non volatile memory. That means that they retain information even if they are not receiving power. Right, So, if you were to turn off your computer and it has an SSD drive in it, you didn't just wipe out everything that was stored on that SSD. It remains there. However, if an SSD goes without power for an extended period, so we're talking like five to ten years here, it can experience what is called bit rot That is, some of those charged gates might lose their charge without access to power, and over time the information degrades. So SSDs are not immune to deterioration either. Given enough time, the information on those will be corrupted as well, without any other external forces being applied to the SSDs. Well, what about cloud storage, because that's changed everything, right, I mean, there's so much of the information that we use day to day that isn't even stored on our native device at all, or what is stored on our native device is a temporary representation of that file. The actual file lives in the cloud. Well, assuming that the company that's providing the storage remains strong, data stored in the cloud tends to be pretty darn resilient. And that's because in order to provide a reputable cloud storage service, or really any cloud service, companies have to ensure redundancy. Now, that just means that any information that's stored to the cloud system has to be stored on multiple machines, because remember, cloud just means someone else's computer. That's really what the cloud is. When you're storing stuff in the cloud, it's not just floating around in the Internet. It's being stored on servers that are part of some massive data server farm that are owned by some even more massive company like Amazon or Microsoft or Google. Now, the reason why these companies store the information on multiple machines is that should a single machine holding information malfunctions or I don't know, goes on fire or something, there are backups on other machines. So the customer ideally never even notices that there's any problem. There's no interruption of service, there's no delay. Their information is still on quote unquote the cloud, when really it's on multiple machines. So this is important because most of these data server farm places, they're using really cheap components, like lots of them, but they're inexpensive and it's you know, it's just off the shelf inexpensive components to store all this information or to run processes. That's what allows them to have this kind of redundancy because they're not spending ridiculous amounts of money to get state of the art machines in there. They don't need that. They just need machines that are you know, more or less reliable and more importantly inexpensive, so that you can have lots of them so that you have backup. So in the background, these companies can replace broken or damage systems with newer ones. They can migrate copies of information onto new machines or existing machines, keep things going smoothly and the customers never notice an issue. Now, there is a caveat there, which I will get to after we come back from this break. So before the break, I alluded to a caveat about having these indefinitely resilient data storage systems using the cloud, and that is I said at the beginning, assuming the company providing the storage remains strong. So we have to remember that much of cloud storage out there is resting in these few big companies, and they are really big and thus pretty resilient to change and to going out of business, but they're not immune to it. Even companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google have their vulnerabilities, and in fact, we're seeing increased pressure from around the world to break some of these companies up because they are so dominant in their respective spaces. So the odds of these companies going out of business are really really low, but they're not zero, or at least it's not zero that they won't be split up, and that ultimately that could lead to discontinuation of services in some areas. So we have to remember that the access to this information remains dependent upon these various companies staying in business and being capable of providing that service, So it's never a guarantee. So even the stuff that's saved in the cloud isn't necessarily permanent, it's probably it's probably in better shape than say something that's saved on a magnet or magnetized tape that you keep in your neodyne magnet room. It's going to be better than that, but it's not bulletproof. There are several other methods for storing information as well, including some that are fairly new. But the point remains our ability to hold on to knowledge depends upon the media we use and the machinery we use to access that media, and if we do not consistently move information to new storage methods, we run the risk of losing the older information. And I'll come back to that at the very end, but let's switch gears for a second, because sometimes we want to get rid of information. Sometimes we need to wipe some storage, you know, maybe we need to make room for something new. Anyone who's had a gaming PC, you've probably at some point said, all right, well, I got to uninstall a couple of these titles so that I can install the newest game I want to play. Or maybe we want to just get rid of something we no longer need or use, or maybe we need to get rid of something because we don't want someone else to see it. For example, let's say that you've upgraded to a brand new computer and you want to sell your old computer, or you're going to donate it to like a school or something, or maybe you just want to recycle it. Well, chances are before you do that, you're going to want to wipe that computer clear of information first. If there's anything personal on computer, you probably don't want it falling into someone else's hands. Like, let's say you get some financial or medical information that was stored somewhere on that machine, you definitely want to get that wiped off before you hand it over to someone else. Well, what happens when you delete data, Well, if you're using a computer and you're moving files to the recycle bin, that doesn't actually mean that the files are gone. Even emptying the recycle bin doesn't necessarily mean the files are gone. What it means is that the computer has essentially designated the respective parts on the storage system holding those files as being available for new information. So like the markers that would designate that as being a file or gone, but the file itself, the information of the file itself is still there. But then when it's time for you to save new information to your computer, some of that new information might be overwritten on top of the older files that you quote unquote, So over time, you will slowly eradicate the information of that deleted file as your computer writes new information to those segments. But it's not instantaneous. And the important thing to remember is that deleting a file doesn't mean the file is gone. It's not enough to just delete a file. Many operating systems include options to let you permanently delete files, and this option typically just involves overwriting the selected deleted files with information, usually garbage data that doesn't actually mean anything. The original file is gone and it's replaced with gibberish. But let's say you have to be absolutely certain that no one will ever retrieve information from your hard drive. Maybe this computer held crucial financial information for an important company, or maybe it held medical information for lots of people, and say like a hospital, and it's time for you to downgrade the system and get rid of it. Well, you're gonna really want to make sure that that machine is wiped clear. So then you might want to engage in what I would like to think of as the nuclear option. It's called the Gutman method. So Peter Gutman and Colin Plum came up with this process in the nineties. It involves overwriting a disk drive with gibberish thirty five times, using different patterns, including some that are not patterns but random passes. So there's no pattern at all. It's just a random overright pass followed by a whole bunch of patterned overwrites followed by more random passes. And this is because even with your standard gibberish overwright, it can still be possible for a determined person with the right tools to retrieve at least some information off of a hard drive. This is because of that magnetic storage. We're talking about the hard disk drive era here, so we're really talking about looking for faint traces of magnetic imprints that could suggest what the original data saved on that hard disk drive was. Even by overwriting, those faint traces might remain. So this was Gutman's way of just obliterating any trace of what was there originally. So you really got to go to extremes, or at least you used to, because Gutman and Plum were really concerned about that magnetic issue. These days, most experts suggest that the Gutman method is really overkill, especially if you're using a solid state drive and that after three passes, you're usually in pretty reliable shape and you don't have to worry about someone getting access to your information. There are also several software packages on the market that can go through the process of deleting files permanently, usually using some form of multipass overwrite patterns. Multipass meaning going over the entire storage drive, not like Leelu Dallas multipass. Sometimes folks go to even further extremes, such as using powerful magnets to destroy you know, magnetic storage that happens where you know you're that'll be part of the process. Some will even use shredders to destroy like hard disk platters and such, so that not only have the files been thoroughly deleted and overwritten, but the physical media itself has been physically destroyed. That's probably overkill for most of us, unless you go by a three number designation like double oh nine or something. But it really is interesting to me that information can simultaneously be challenging to preserve and difficult to get rid of. But we're also talking about different time skills here, right, It's not apples to apples for preservation. We're really concerned about the long haul, how can we keep information accessible even as the way we generate, store, and retrieve information changes. How can we ensure that future generations will have access to the information that's at our disposal today. There are so many offshoots of this as well. For example, the desire to preserve old information is what drove the creators of the multi Arcade Machine Emulator software or MAIM to do what they do. They wanted to create a way to preserve code that otherwise could fade into obscurity because these old arcade machines were physically coded onto chips that were part of these arcade cabinets, and over time more of those cabinets ended up being destroyed or they become inoperable, and so this was an attempt to create a system that would preserve that code, to make it playable, not necessarily for people to play, but again to preserve the code itself, otherwise it would be lost. And as for destroying information, well that tends to be for short term requirements, right, if there's nothing that's threatening us or our information, well we could just play the waiting game, depending on how we've stored the information in the first place, because sooner or later the medium that the information is on will deteriorate or it'll go obsolete, and no one will be able to get the information anyway, including you. So if you don't, if you're not in a rush, you could just wait and the information will eventually no longer be accessible. Now related to these concepts, by the way, is the challenge of figuring out how to future proof messaging so that people far into the future will understand what those messages mean. Let's think back to the Egyptian example. Without the Rosetta stone, we would have no way of knowing what the hieroglyphs mean. Not for sure. We could have a lot of hypotheses, but we wouldn't be able to really test them and prove that our hypothesis is accurate. So let's take an example. Let's take the problem of nuclear waste from nuclear power facilities. So some nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years and we have to store it. We have to put it someplace where it's out of the way and safe. And it also means that any warnings that we put up at nuclear waste storage facilities really needs to be easy for future generations to interpret, even if they have lost all other records of what that site is, so the signage needs to convey displace is dangerous. But then, as that hieroglyphs example showed us, this is easier said than done. We might do something that to us seems completely obvious, but there's no way of knowing that people ten thousand years from now will still understand it. There are experts who work hard to create iconography and messaging that someone unfamiliar with our current alphabet and language and symbols might understand. So for a really awesome treatment of this topic, I highly recommend a classic episode of ninety nine percent Invisible, a phenomenal show. If you've never listened to it, you definitely need to is It is one of the best podcasts I've ever listened to. But this particular one comes from way back when it was like twenty fourteen when it published, and it is titled ten thousand Years. Really a great, great episode. You should check that out. It's an incredible treatment of the challenge of how do you convey information to people that there's no way for us to know anything about them, and keeping in mind, like we're talking ten thousand years, because nuclear waste can stay dangerous that long. You go back ten thousand years and you suddenly think, wow, yeah, creating a message that would be readable ten thousand years from now that is going to be super challenging to do so. Yeah. Storing data, retrieving data, destroying data, all of these things have their own challenges and obstacles in front of them. It's important for us to think about because it's also important for us to take steps to preserve things when we can. There are other great examples we can use. One I would point out is that a lot of people, particularly in my generation, we used stuff like Facebook to become kind of the storage center for photographs, right, Like, I have hundreds of photos stored on Facebook. But then I decided to peace out a Facebook. So I needed to download my Facebook information because otherwise I was going to lose access to all those pictures that I had stored. And it was just a kind of thing I had taken for granted that I would always be on Facebook and I would always have access to those images, and now I don't. And so it's again an example of things that we have to keep in mind when we choose a storage method, is that we should also occasionally think of ways to migrate information to a new storage method to make certain that we don't lose what came before. All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode about the paradoxical nature of information in the digital age. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland di'mond executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are yet. You know, I thought it might be interesting to talk about how data can both be easy to lose and hard to lose. It's a paradise, but really this is all about the media upon which we store data and how that media can pose various challenges. Now, first up, let's just talk about the concept of obsolescence. So as our technology, our language, our culture, as all these things evolve and we discover new ways to commit information to different types of media, we often leave the older methods behind. And for example, very few people are recording audio to wax cylinders today. For example, you know Thomas Edison did it, but you don't see people doing it now, at least not outside of you know, historical demonstrations and that sort of thing. The days of storing info magnetically onto strips of metal, like we saw at the end of the nineteenth century, that's pretty far behind us too, although magnetic tape is built on the same principle. But before we use tape, we used wire, not that frequently, but it was one of those things that kind of paved the way toward magnetic tape. Now, over time, all media will ultimately go obsolete, either because the stuff we recorded upon has worn out, the actual physical stuff has broken, or because we've lost the ability to retrieve information from that type of media. And that inability to retrieve can range from the technical to just our knowledge of how to do it. So let's take a moment to consider something that is pretty far removed from modern technology unless you watch stargate, and that is hieroglyphs. So thousands of years ago, the people of ancient Egypt developed a writing system that was complicated, to say the least. So our Latin alphabet, the one that we use in English, for example, has twenty six characters write twenty six letters in the alphabet, and hieroglyphs had hundreds of characters, like a thousand or more. Now, some of the characters in ancient Egypt represented basic phonemes. Phonemes are sounds within a language, right, like would be a phoneeme or like these are basic sounds. But other characters in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, they represented entire words, or at least parts of words. Some represented stills, so not necessarily parts of words like you would think, but a syllable that was common in ancient Egypt. But over the millennia, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs faded from Egyptian culture. There were a lot of reasons for this. I mean, the style of writing down information changed from hieroglyphs to like demonic writing, and beyond Also, you had folks like you know, Europeans, like Greeks and Romans, who were invading Egypt and changing things and disrupting Egyptian culture significantly. By the time we got a few centuries into the common era, pretty much no one knew how to read the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt anymore. So we had all this knowledge stored in various places and no way to retrieve that knowledge. It appeared as though we had lost all of it, or that we had, due to some misconceptions, completely miss interpreted that knowledge. So by the time we got into the medieval era, there was this prevailing hypothesis that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were symbolic in meaning, And by that I mean that the images that the Egyptians used were thought of to be direct symbols of whatever the message was. So let's say you had images of a boat and a snake, then you might be led to think that what you're looking at must be an allegorical story about snakes on a boat, possibly starring Samuel L. Jackson. But no, the symbols used weren't meant to represent exactly what they looked like. They represented elements of a language. So, for example, if you want to understand what I'm saying, our letter S looks kind of like a snake, right, but it doesn't mean snake. When you see the letter S, that doesn't mean snake. It could be the beginning of the word snake. Obviously that begins with S, but it could mean anything. It represents the S sound, which is found in lots of words, not just snake. And the hieroglyphs were similar, but no one had a document that matched hieroglyphs to some other known language so that someone could actually decipher the symbols. So it just seemed to be, you know, all these icons that the meaning had been completely lost. But then came Napoleon Ponaparte and his armies invaded Egypt toward the end of the eighteenth century, and in the process the armies happened across something incredibly important, and it would later be called the Rosetta Stone. Now, the Rosetta Stone itself is a type of monument, and there are carvings on the monument that represent an official dynastic decree. The carvings are in three different written languages. So at the base of the monument you have the carving in ancient Greek, above that is Demotic that is an Egyptian language that followed the High language, and at the top are hieroglyphs. And since all three carvings represented the same decree, this gave experts the opportunity to finally begin deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and so began the long process of uncovering lost knowledge. And this was helped by subsequent discoveries of similar decrees, so that we, over time were able to understand what these hieroglyphs actually stood for. We understood that it was a written language that wasn't just purely symbolic. Now, my point in telling the story is that we have to remind ourselves that while we have ways to record knowledge. It would be foolish for us to assume that any way that we use is permanent, because we've got plenty of examples of knowledge being lost in the past, whether it's because people forgot how to access that knowledge, or maybe the knowledge was based in folklore and the people that were the stewards of that knowledge were wiped out or assimilated and the knowledge was lost, or maybe the physical copies, if it was like a written language, maybe the physical copies were lost. And a shout out to the late great Library of Alexandria, which I should add kind of faded away, not just because the famous fire set by Julius Caesar's forces, though that clearly was a catastrophic event, but also there was a long period in which leaders were cracking down on scholars because well, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a lot of knowledge has got to be absolutely deadly, right. But anyway, let's skip ahead to the modern era. So even today we run the risk of losing access to information because we no longer make the stuff, what plays the media that we used in the old days, or at least in many cases, it is getting really tricky to track down the components that can retrieve data from those types of media. Right, you might be able to find old working equipment that can access certain types of stuff that otherwise we no longer can access. But it's rare that you're gonna find someone make a new version of that. It's not impossible. It's not like we've lost all ability to It's just that unless there is a pressing financial benefit to creating that kind of stuff, no one's going to bother to do it. Because you know, it's expensive to produce older types of technologies, and unless there's a financial incentive, no one's going to do it. It's had to say so. There's also the danger that the media we rely upon could wear out and deteriorate over time. So, for example, let's consider celluloid or film. Cinematic film degrades over time, particularly if it's in a hot and moist environment. And you might have heard about some filmmakers storing prints of their movies or masters of their movies in old salt mines such as the one that's below Hutchinson, Kansas in the United States. These subterranean spaces maintain a constant temperature of around sixty eight fahrenheit or twenty celsius, and they have a low humidity somewhere between like forty to forty five percent humidity. Of course, movies are not the only things stored in those minds. That in fact, we got the idea because of the story of the monument men who ended up finding lots of stolen art from various parts of Europe that the Nazis had collected and stored in salt mines. We ended up kind of using the same idea because it's a great way to preserve stuff. If you otherwise, it's in danger of deterioration. Also, we have to acknowledge that while it's a great way to preserve stuff, there's a tragedy here because we're also removing it right from us. You know, we're storing it and we're preserving it, But to what end if you can't access it, then it doesn't really like there's a lot of questions. There are philosophical questions. If you have a priceless work of art stored in assault mind and no one can go there, is it the same as not having it at all. Now, in the case of film, a lot of studios will actually use those master recordings. When they want to do a remastered version of the film they want to release it on say like Blu ray or something, they'll go to the original print that's stored in as salt mine and they'll pull from that. But yeah, there's lots of other stuff besides just film down there, anything that needs a controlled environment in order to stop or at least slow deterioration. Now, magnetic tape is another important storage method, and we've been using magnetic tape as storage since the mid twentieth century, around nineteen fifty one or so, and again the basic principle behind it dates back to the late nineteenth century. That was when we were using magnetic wire. But whether it's real to real tape, or cassettes or VHS tapes, we've relied on this methodology to store all sorts of information, from computer information to music in the case of like the cassette tapes of the eighties nineties or the VHS videotapes, all sorts of info we have committed to magnetic tape, and a lot of companies still rely on magnetic tape for long term storage and backups. When I use long term storage, i'm speaking relatively as we will see now some older forms of magnetic tape are largely obsolete because the devices we'd use to read the data from them are out of production. You might find a working device here or there, but they can be pretty rare, and being mechanical in nature, they will eventually require maintenance or they'll stop working. And when you're talking about this kind of stuff, often you're talking about things that have parts that no one's making anymore, so it becomes very challenging to keep them in good working order because there's a limited supply of components you can use to make replacements when something breaks down. On top of all that, magnetic information itself can degrade over time, actually can degrade really quickly if it's in the presence of a strong magnetic field, which is why as a kid I was told never to bring a magnet close to a computer or computer discs because you could actually corrupt information that's stored on those devices because the magnet would realign the magnetic components that were on this plastic film, or in the case of a computer, a raid on a platter inside the hard disk drive. Now, on average, if stored in decent conditions, magnetic tape typically will retain data from anywhere between ten to twenty years. When stored in prime conditions like in that salt mine, for example, you might stretch it to around thirty years. So magnetic tape can hold on to data for a while, but certainly not indefinitely. It will sooner or later degrade to a point where the information will be corrupted or irretrievable. Now, on a similar note, let's talk floppy disks. So when I was a kid, our Apple two E computer had a five and a quarter inch floppy disk drive. These were not the first floppy disks. There were older ones. There were larger ones. IBM created eight inch floppy disks for example. And the discs that I was familiar with back when I was using the Apple to E were these plastic envelopes, and the envelopes were covering a disc of magnetic film on the inside, and it was on this magnetic disc that you could save and retreat data. And I actually had to look this up because I could not remember it myself. But the original five and a quarter inch floppy disks could hold up to ninety kilobytes of data. That's when they were first created. So that's just ninety kilobytes. But over time, you know, engineers improved the technology. They increased the capacity of floppy discs. Typically, they did this by creating more precise read write heads so they could store data in smaller physical sizes, which meant you could cram more of it onto the same sized disc. They also figured out how to multilayer discs, so that increased storage as well. I think, you know, some discs maxed out at around seven hundred and twenty kilobytes, so significantly more than ninety, but still way less than what we use today. Now I'm going to talk more about floppy disks and other forms of storage and why all these different types have kind of a limited shelf life of one span or another. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and we were talking about floppy discs. Well, my parents write novels, and so my dad's first books, which were written in the early eighties, they were written on that old Apple two E computer, and he would save chapters of his books to floppy discs. Each novel would take up several discs, like I don't know, around a dozen or so, I can't quite remember. I remember we had disk holders that would hold like maybe three of his novels, because that's how many discs would be taken up just by storing chapters onto them. I'm not sure if he actually still owns those floppy discs, but I imagine that even if he does, he doesn't have any way to check and see if the data is still there or not. He would need an Apple to E or an emulator to simulate an Apple to E on another machine. Plus he would have to have a floppy disk drive connected to whatever computer he was using in order to try and read those disks. And floppy disk drives are not completely gone. You can still find them. They are increasingly rare, however, so it's easy to imagine that a day will come when anything stored on discs like that, like my dad's books, will just become lost simply because no one makes the stuff capable of reading it anymore. And the stuff that already exists will eventually break down, and you know, the actual magnetic information on the discs will degrade over time too, just like with magnetic tape. Eventually you'll have some of those magnetic particles move out of alignment. That's going to corrupt your data. I know I keep saying data and data. I know I do that. I don't know why I do that, and I can't predict when it happens. It just does. I apologize for it, though, because I know it drives some of you crazy, and my apologies. It just happens anyway. Those particles will move out of alignment, the information gets corrupted, So yeah, switch to information there, and then you can't retrieve it anymore. So that can happen too. Even if you have a working computer system that could theoretically pull that information off the disc, sometimes the information on the disc itself will become corrupt. Now, we also have to keep in mind that media that we still use today because hardly. I mean, people do still use floppy disks depending on the situation, but it's pretty rare. But even the stuff that we do use today, eventually that's going to become obsolete too. Just a few years ago, compact discs were the go to for data storage, at least for personal computers, though a lot of enterprises would continue to rely on magnetic tape for more long term backups, and compact discs are a type of optical storage, meaning that Rather than using magnetism to align tiny particles on a physical surface, we're using lasers to write and to read from these discs. The information is stored in water called pits and lands, pits being a designated pit in the surface, and lands being the spaces between pits. Though rewriteable CDs actually kind of use foggy and clear sections that are very very tiny, you wouldn't be able to see them with the naked eye. Now, compact discs allow us to create a more dense storage system, so we could put way more information on a single CD than we could with stuff like floppy discs. Now, Unlike cassettes and floppy disks, optical discs are not affected by magnetism. So if you did bring a powerful magnet close to a bunch of floppy disks or cassette tapes or anything that uses magnetic storage, you would scramble the information on there because the powerful magnet would realign the magnetic particles that are on the tape. But optical discs don't have magnetic particles, so they would be immune to that kind of interference. However, this does not mean that optical discs last forever, so there are many layers on a compact disc. Same thing with DVDs and blue rays. By the way, there are several layers involved, and these layers can have chemical reactions in them, and those chemical reactions can cause those layers to degrade over time. So like a CD that's stored in a very humid and warm place, like if people had stored their CDs, their music CDs inside their car and the summer in Georgia, they might find that those CDs don't last that long, like they might last a few seasons, but eventually they degrade, and they will. You know, if you're in a hot and humid environment, then a disc is going to degrade faster, not like instantaneously, but it will start to degrade faster than it would if you stored it in a cooler, dry place. And that outer layer on a CD, that's the clear layer, right, It's protective and it's clear so that a laser can go through it. But sometimes that clear layer can start to rot away and it can leave the reflective layer that's underneath it exposed. And with some CDs, that reflective layer is made up of silver or sometimes a silver compound, and silver when exposed to air will tarnish. The tarnished silver won't reflect a laser properly, and so you start to get errors when you're trying to read information off of that kind of CD. Now, not all CDs were made that way, right, so only some CDs have this particular bronzing issue. In fact, our research group determined that the CDs that really have this specific problem we're all pressed in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, between the years nineteen eighty eight and nineteen nine. That's pretty darn specific. Now. The issue here, though, is that there's really no way to give an average lifespan for a compact disc because there's no such thing as an average compact discs there were there were so many different manufacturing and pressing processes and recording processes that different ones could last a different you know, theoretical maximum amount of time. So we can't really answer the question how long on average will as CD last. I've seen a lot of people suggest five to ten years, some people saying ten to twenty, some people going as far as fifty. I think it really depends on the way the CD was made and what storage facility it's in, Like, is it in a house where it's kept out of sunlight because UV radiation can affect CDs. Is it kept cool and dry, then it's gonna last longer. Is it not handled a lot? Like if it's it's your favorite music CD, and you handle it a lot, then it's going to degrade faster. Again, not instantaneously, and it may not even be noticeable at first, but eventually you might get the things where it starts to skip on a certain track, or it won't even play certain tracks. That will happen over time. And it's a similar story for other optical formats, which include you know, DVDs and Blu ray discs. These two have a limited lifespan, though that lifespan may stretch to as long as a century under ideal conditions. And a century is a long time for a single person, right, I mean, that's that's a significant amount of time. However, if we step outside of a human's lifespan and we look at it from the perspective of a historical account, then one hundred years is not long at all. I mean, imagine for a moment, if you had no access to any information that was recorded before nineteen twenty ten, because all the media that we had used to record info on had fallen apart or was otherwise unusable or inaccessible. That nothing before nineteen twenty two would be knowable apart from what people wrote about those times post nineteen twenty two. That would be crazy, right, But that's the kind of situation we're in when we start looking at digital information. All right, Well, what about we look at like hard drives, hard disk drives and solid state drives, you know, the stuff that's in your computer systems, your smartphones, that kind of thing. What do they have? You know, how long will information last in those? Well, they stored information in different ways. Hard disk drives have one or more platters in them, and each platter has a magnetic coding on it upon which information can be stored. So, just like cassettes and floppy disks and other magnetic storage methods, hard disk drives can be affected by powerful magnetic fields because they too, store information magnetically. Hardness drives have moving parts, so the platters spin quite quickly in fact, and an actuator mechanical arm with a read write quote unquote head on it. This is the bit that either can read the magnetic particles that are stored on a platter, or it can actually exert a magnetic field that aligns the particles. When you're writing information on the platter, it moves across the platter and it starts to retrieve or write information to the disc itself. And because we're talking about moving parts here, stuff can and does wear down over time and use. If it gets a lot of use, it wears out more quickly. Also, it means that you should be gentle when you're moving anything that happens to have a hard disk drive inside of it, because a good whack can damage the delicate parts. If you knock that actuator arm out of alignment, that's a big problem. It's going to be impossible to read or write stuff reliably to that hard disk drive. Now, hard drives don't tend to last very long because of those mechanical parts. I've seen estimates of the life span for hard disk drives lasting somewhere between three to maybe six and a half years, seven years. Some give it a little bit longer, some a little bit shorter. Of course, a hard disk drive can last longer than a decade. But that's you know, if we're looking at typical use and we're looking at the average life span of hard disk drives, we tend to fall in that three to seven year range, So your mileage may vary. It may depend upon how you use your hard disk drive and the setting that you're in. So they will eventually break down. Also, even if they don't break down sooner or later, really later, that magnetic information will start to move out of alignment just naturally. And so even if you were to preserve a hard disk drive perfectly and come back to it in a century, chances are a lot of the information would no longer be accessible because the actual magnetic particles would no longer be in the proper alignment. Solid state drives store information in a totally different way from hard disk drives, So instead of aligning magnetic particles, and SSD stores information through flash memory similar to USB sticks and other types of flash drives. These drives store information using nand flash that's in a n D and that in turn is composed of what are called floating gate transistors. And all of this gets super technical, but let's just kind of imagine it this way. Each floating gate can be either charged, which means it's a zero, or it could be non charged, which means it's a one. So it gets a little bit confusing because we often think of binary with zero being off and one being on. But in this case, zero means that there is a charge in a cell and one means there is no charge in that cell, And a drive is made up of a grid of these cells. So USB flash drives and SSDs are non volatile memory. That means that they retain information even if they are not receiving power. Right, So, if you were to turn off your computer and it has an SSD drive in it, you didn't just wipe out everything that was stored on that SSD. It remains there. However, if an SSD goes without power for an extended period, so we're talking like five to ten years here, it can experience what is called bit rot That is, some of those charged gates might lose their charge without access to power, and over time the information degrades. So SSDs are not immune to deterioration either. Given enough time, the information on those will be corrupted as well, without any other external forces being applied to the SSDs. Well, what about cloud storage, because that's changed everything, right, I mean, there's so much of the information that we use day to day that isn't even stored on our native device at all, or what is stored on our native device is a temporary representation of that file. The actual file lives in the cloud. Well, assuming that the company that's providing the storage remains strong, data stored in the cloud tends to be pretty darn resilient. And that's because in order to provide a reputable cloud storage service, or really any cloud service, companies have to ensure redundancy. Now, that just means that any information that's stored to the cloud system has to be stored on multiple machines, because remember, cloud just means someone else's computer. That's really what the cloud is. When you're storing stuff in the cloud, it's not just floating around in the Internet. It's being stored on servers that are part of some massive data server farm that are owned by some even more massive company like Amazon or Microsoft or Google. Now, the reason why these companies store the information on multiple machines is that should a single machine holding information malfunctions or I don't know, goes on fire or something, there are backups on other machines. So the customer ideally never even notices that there's any problem. There's no interruption of service, there's no delay. Their information is still on quote unquote the cloud, when really it's on multiple machines. So this is important because most of these data server farm places, they're using really cheap components, like lots of them, but they're inexpensive and it's you know, it's just off the shelf inexpensive components to store all this information or to run processes. That's what allows them to have this kind of redundancy because they're not spending ridiculous amounts of money to get state of the art machines in there. They don't need that. They just need machines that are you know, more or less reliable and more importantly inexpensive, so that you can have lots of them so that you have backup. So in the background, these companies can replace broken or damage systems with newer ones. They can migrate copies of information onto new machines or existing machines, keep things going smoothly and the customers never notice an issue. Now, there is a caveat there, which I will get to after we come back from this break. So before the break, I alluded to a caveat about having these indefinitely resilient data storage systems using the cloud, and that is I said at the beginning, assuming the company providing the storage remains strong. So we have to remember that much of cloud storage out there is resting in these few big companies, and they are really big and thus pretty resilient to change and to going out of business, but they're not immune to it. Even companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google have their vulnerabilities, and in fact, we're seeing increased pressure from around the world to break some of these companies up because they are so dominant in their respective spaces. So the odds of these companies going out of business are really really low, but they're not zero, or at least it's not zero that they won't be split up, and that ultimately that could lead to discontinuation of services in some areas. So we have to remember that the access to this information remains dependent upon these various companies staying in business and being capable of providing that service, So it's never a guarantee. So even the stuff that's saved in the cloud isn't necessarily permanent, it's probably it's probably in better shape than say something that's saved on a magnet or magnetized tape that you keep in your neodyne magnet room. It's going to be better than that, but it's not bulletproof. There are several other methods for storing information as well, including some that are fairly new. But the point remains our ability to hold on to knowledge depends upon the media we use and the machinery we use to access that media, and if we do not consistently move information to new storage methods, we run the risk of losing the older information. And I'll come back to that at the very end, but let's switch gears for a second, because sometimes we want to get rid of information. Sometimes we need to wipe some storage, you know, maybe we need to make room for something new. Anyone who's had a gaming PC, you've probably at some point said, all right, well, I got to uninstall a couple of these titles so that I can install the newest game I want to play. Or maybe we want to just get rid of something we no longer need or use, or maybe we need to get rid of something because we don't want someone else to see it. For example, let's say that you've upgraded to a brand new computer and you want to sell your old computer, or you're going to donate it to like a school or something, or maybe you just want to recycle it. Well, chances are before you do that, you're going to want to wipe that computer clear of information first. If there's anything personal on computer, you probably don't want it falling into someone else's hands. Like, let's say you get some financial or medical information that was stored somewhere on that machine, you definitely want to get that wiped off before you hand it over to someone else. Well, what happens when you delete data, Well, if you're using a computer and you're moving files to the recycle bin, that doesn't actually mean that the files are gone. Even emptying the recycle bin doesn't necessarily mean the files are gone. What it means is that the computer has essentially designated the respective parts on the storage system holding those files as being available for new information. So like the markers that would designate that as being a file or gone, but the file itself, the information of the file itself is still there. But then when it's time for you to save new information to your computer, some of that new information might be overwritten on top of the older files that you quote unquote, So over time, you will slowly eradicate the information of that deleted file as your computer writes new information to those segments. But it's not instantaneous. And the important thing to remember is that deleting a file doesn't mean the file is gone. It's not enough to just delete a file. Many operating systems include options to let you permanently delete files, and this option typically just involves overwriting the selected deleted files with information, usually garbage data that doesn't actually mean anything. The original file is gone and it's replaced with gibberish. But let's say you have to be absolutely certain that no one will ever retrieve information from your hard drive. Maybe this computer held crucial financial information for an important company, or maybe it held medical information for lots of people, and say like a hospital, and it's time for you to downgrade the system and get rid of it. Well, you're gonna really want to make sure that that machine is wiped clear. So then you might want to engage in what I would like to think of as the nuclear option. It's called the Gutman method. So Peter Gutman and Colin Plum came up with this process in the nineties. It involves overwriting a disk drive with gibberish thirty five times, using different patterns, including some that are not patterns but random passes. So there's no pattern at all. It's just a random overright pass followed by a whole bunch of patterned overwrites followed by more random passes. And this is because even with your standard gibberish overwright, it can still be possible for a determined person with the right tools to retrieve at least some information off of a hard drive. This is because of that magnetic storage. We're talking about the hard disk drive era here, so we're really talking about looking for faint traces of magnetic imprints that could suggest what the original data saved on that hard disk drive was. Even by overwriting, those faint traces might remain. So this was Gutman's way of just obliterating any trace of what was there originally. So you really got to go to extremes, or at least you used to, because Gutman and Plum were really concerned about that magnetic issue. These days, most experts suggest that the Gutman method is really overkill, especially if you're using a solid state drive and that after three passes, you're usually in pretty reliable shape and you don't have to worry about someone getting access to your information. There are also several software packages on the market that can go through the process of deleting files permanently, usually using some form of multipass overwrite patterns. Multipass meaning going over the entire storage drive, not like Leelu Dallas multipass. Sometimes folks go to even further extremes, such as using powerful magnets to destroy you know, magnetic storage that happens where you know you're that'll be part of the process. Some will even use shredders to destroy like hard disk platters and such, so that not only have the files been thoroughly deleted and overwritten, but the physical media itself has been physically destroyed. That's probably overkill for most of us, unless you go by a three number designation like double oh nine or something. But it really is interesting to me that information can simultaneously be challenging to preserve and difficult to get rid of. But we're also talking about different time skills here, right, It's not apples to apples for preservation. We're really concerned about the long haul, how can we keep information accessible even as the way we generate, store, and retrieve information changes. How can we ensure that future generations will have access to the information that's at our disposal today. There are so many offshoots of this as well. For example, the desire to preserve old information is what drove the creators of the multi Arcade Machine Emulator software or MAIM to do what they do. They wanted to create a way to preserve code that otherwise could fade into obscurity because these old arcade machines were physically coded onto chips that were part of these arcade cabinets, and over time more of those cabinets ended up being destroyed or they become inoperable, and so this was an attempt to create a system that would preserve that code, to make it playable, not necessarily for people to play, but again to preserve the code itself, otherwise it would be lost. And as for destroying information, well that tends to be for short term requirements, right, if there's nothing that's threatening us or our information, well we could just play the waiting game, depending on how we've stored the information in the first place, because sooner or later the medium that the information is on will deteriorate or it'll go obsolete, and no one will be able to get the information anyway, including you. So if you don't, if you're not in a rush, you could just wait and the information will eventually no longer be accessible. Now related to these concepts, by the way, is the challenge of figuring out how to future proof messaging so that people far into the future will understand what those messages mean. Let's think back to the Egyptian example. Without the Rosetta stone, we would have no way of knowing what the hieroglyphs mean. Not for sure. We could have a lot of hypotheses, but we wouldn't be able to really test them and prove that our hypothesis is accurate. So let's take an example. Let's take the problem of nuclear waste from nuclear power facilities. So some nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years and we have to store it. We have to put it someplace where it's out of the way and safe. And it also means that any warnings that we put up at nuclear waste storage facilities really needs to be easy for future generations to interpret, even if they have lost all other records of what that site is, so the signage needs to convey displace is dangerous. But then, as that hieroglyphs example showed us, this is easier said than done. We might do something that to us seems completely obvious, but there's no way of knowing that people ten thousand years from now will still understand it. There are experts who work hard to create iconography and messaging that someone unfamiliar with our current alphabet and language and symbols might understand. So for a really awesome treatment of this topic, I highly recommend a classic episode of ninety nine percent Invisible, a phenomenal show. If you've never listened to it, you definitely need to is It is one of the best podcasts I've ever listened to. But this particular one comes from way back when it was like twenty fourteen when it published, and it is titled ten thousand Years. Really a great, great episode. You should check that out. It's an incredible treatment of the challenge of how do you convey information to people that there's no way for us to know anything about them, and keeping in mind, like we're talking ten thousand years, because nuclear waste can stay dangerous that long. You go back ten thousand years and you suddenly think, wow, yeah, creating a message that would be readable ten thousand years from now that is going to be super challenging to do so. Yeah. Storing data, retrieving data, destroying data, all of these things have their own challenges and obstacles in front of them. It's important for us to think about because it's also important for us to take steps to preserve things when we can. There are other great examples we can use. One I would point out is that a lot of people, particularly in my generation, we used stuff like Facebook to become kind of the storage center for photographs, right, Like, I have hundreds of photos stored on Facebook. But then I decided to peace out a Facebook. So I needed to download my Facebook information because otherwise I was going to lose access to all those pictures that I had stored. And it was just a kind of thing I had taken for granted that I would always be on Facebook and I would always have access to those images, and now I don't. And so it's again an example of things that we have to keep in mind when we choose a storage method, is that we should also occasionally think of ways to migrate information to a new storage method to make certain that we don't lose what came before. All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode about the paradoxical nature of information in the digital age. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.