David Pogue of nytimes.com has a reminder about the fallibility of current data storage systems in this interview with Dag Spicer of the Computer History Museum.

To quote Spicer: “If Moses had gotten the Ten Commandments on a floppy disk, it would never have made it to today.”

Bottom line: paper seems to be one of the better methods for archival storage. That data you laboriously transferred onto CDs and DVDs may only last a few years.

Ironically, back when I was studying Computer Science at university, we did use paper storage media: perforated tape and punch cards. Not that any of my assignments were worth saving. 😉

Photos by Aldoaldoz (top) and BinaryApe on Flickr