"Digital Dark Age."

All through out history... we dug through our trash, through our attics and through out basements. But that is changing!

 

We are entering the age of the digital dark ages! The photo left, are my parents on their anniversary at our New Hampshire cottage back in the eighties... I can find it upstairs in the file cabinet in my office. This copy was from Google Doc where I have a lot of my photos stored here.

 

My grandfather 1925

There are over a dozen albums with photos. They go all the way back to the turn of the century—no, not the 21st century, but the 20th century! The old black-and-white photos are browning, but the color photos are horrible! Especially the slides. Our history is slowly turning red as they age, but the good news is there are ways to correct the colors.

I have them stored on a 2TB network drive that is a RAID 1. What that means is that there are two 2-terabyte drives that have a mirrored copy of the data, so if one drive crashes, I have the backup!

But now, our history is stored on "The Cloud!"

Now, if a data center somewhere in the world crashes, there go our photos! Yes, data centers have backup data centers and backup power. But wars happen. Earthquakes happen. Businesses go bust. Then what?
 

Suppose Google goes belly-up and all your files—not just your photos, but everything you have stored on Google—go poof! No trash to dig through. No attics to look through on a rainy day. No damp basements to paw through. What will our future historians find about us in a couple of thousand years?