I think there's a middle ground though. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics were around but not understood until the rosetta stone was found. Without a "digital rosetta stone" those terabytes would be similarly useless.

There's also some historical value in journals of every day folks, e.g. soldier's notes from major battles or those present at historical events.

Given how good people are at cracking things, I seriously doubt it would be that hard to crack a file format.

Well, cracking 100 years from now will probably be much harder. For example, could CSS be as easily cracked if you didn't know it was for DVD video and didn't have access to a working reference implementation?

Either way, we're surely capable of leaving a better legacy than what we currently have.

Even if DVD codecs are 100% opaque to future historians, recall that no video of any format existed until the 20th century, and widespread ubiquitous video recording didn't exist until the 21st. If we're entering a dark age now, what does that make former ages?

I agree that the "dark age" designation is not the best (and perhaps sensational), but the basic issue of how to maintain digital data isn't worth writing off...

Exactly. Note the dearth of photographs of the Titanic. Just a handful, and that was a major project.

Problem: floppy disks and DVDs has a shelf life that's less than 100 years.

How many letters do you have from your great grandparents? For me, it's zero. For records to be preserved, someone has to care about preserving them. For digital data, that means copying it forward to newer media now and then.

I'm sorry, but there's a huge difference in preserving a letter and a file. I say this as someone who has worked in the field of preservation (mostly digital) for close to a decade.

Really simplified... For a letter to be preserved: put it in a box and take it with you when you move and hope that the house doesn't burn down. For a file to be preserved: keep backups to avoid data corruption and media deterioration. Also: control physical media obsolescence and format obsolescence. Most people don't have clue about these things. If our cultural heritage institutions don't get their hands on some of these files, most of them will likely be lost.

And no, it's not only about our great grandparents. It's also about the Turings and Einstens. Their day to day mail correspondence has taught us quite a lot. Turing might not have been a good example though... :)

The problems are simply different, not one is better than with the other. With paper and film, making backups is tedious and expensive and rarely happens. They get lost, mildewed, thrown away, looted, burned, flooded, blown up, eaten by insects, etc. Much of my family history got lost that way. Any piece of paper surviving 200 years is a miracle.

Paper archives have the unfortunate characteristic of concentrating treasures together. 9/11 apparently destroyed quite an archive of photos - we don't even know what all was there. The Vatican Library concentrates a huge collection of paper, and one little event could take it all away.

With digital, copies are cheap. I've been copying forward my old stuff for 40 years now (though I did lose my old IBM punchcard decks and paper tapes!), and it does get easier. With cheap terabyte drives, one drive will hold it all, and I can make copies to make it resistant to catastrophe.

The Vatican Library really needs to make it a priority to scan all those papers.

Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language?

Isn't there far more complexity in our current stack than beowulf?

Even if data survived, it would take an incredible effort to use.

> Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language?

I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746

True, but how many people do we have working on that problem?

Compare to the number of people and years of effort that went into building our modern computing platforms. How much research and investment in a very lucrative field? A quick assessment of my university's finances shows they spend twice as much money per diploma on the sciences vs the arts. (Honestly surprised it's that much, though it does exclude medicine which is twice as much as science)

Then consider the hardware and engineers. Just getting to a bit stream is very complex.

I estimate decoding a modern piece of data would be similar to building our entire computerized technology field very nearly from scratch. In my mind that's several orders of magnitude of effort off.