As always, I got the username wrong…

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • The issue with hard drives is that they tend to fail even on ideal conditions and even when powered down. Yes I’ve lost very important data to a powered down hard drive.

    While it’s possible to recover information on a hard drive as long as the plates themselves aren’t damaged, that requires very expensive specialised tools and skills. Which probably wouldn’t be available in a scenario where the information on the drive would be of any value.

    DVD-R (and probably consequentially Blu-Rays) aren’t any better in my experience, I’ve lost more data to DVD-R than to hard drives actually. Even when stored in low light conditions they tend to just stop reading.

    However optical media has one big advantage here, is that the discs themselves are cheap, so instead of having all your digital eggs in the same basket, you spread them over several discs and while some information may be lost, others may survive.

    Now, here’s an interesting thought, with digital data, the data either reads or doesn’t read, the so called digital cliff, may become partially corrupted and other parts still read, but after the corruption gets past a certain threshold all information is lost.

    With analogue equipment even after severe signal degradation the contents while very deteriorated may still be perceptible, forwardermore an analogue signal is much easier to decode in the event that you need to restart civilisation building tech from scratch and don’t have access to the very very specific specifications of something like the audio codec or the filesystem.

    You can probably hack a rudimentary cassette player together from very simple components, all you need is a tape head (a coil), a motor (a coil and a magnet), and an amplifier (a transistor or vaccum tube). (I’m probably oversimplifying here).

    Overall I think the most important thing is having redundancy, or if redundancy isn’t possible at least don’t have all eggs in the same basket, instead of having everything in a single 8TB HDD, to try spread them into smaller 512GB ones, or DVDs or flash drives or all of the above. And don’t store them all in the same location, if an area gets flooded or someone builds a building on top, you’re only losing a small part of the information.



  • I personally would throw the dishwasher away, and before that, permanently damage it to make sure no poor soul picks it up from the trash thinking they scored a free dishwasher without knowing it was once used to wash literal shit.

    I would never be able to ever eat anything from any dish every washed on that machine, but again, that’s me and my personal emotional reaction to it. I understand that if it reaches 90C it technically kills all bacteria or something. But I would still refuse.

    For that same reason I never buy used kitchen utensils, because I have no way to know what has be used for before.