Google on hard drive failures

[Kevin Handy]

der Mouse wrote:
>
> Certainly.  And forget centrues; try millennia.  The Pyramids.  The
> Sphinx.  Stonehenge.  The French cave paintings.  Old Greek and Roman
> coins from archaeological digs.
>   

However, since the formatting information on the cave paintings
has been lost, all we can say is "that *looks* like a horse, but why
is he ...".  We are also mostly guessing on the others, too.
At least the Egyptians left us the Rosetta Stone, which gave us
a chance at breaking the format.

Maybe, sometime in the distant future, people will look at our stuff
and say, "that must have been built by aliens".
> Of course, they're not much good for backups (which is where this
> started), unless you have *really* small amounts of data to back up,
> but yes, we as a species can create artifacts that last many centuries;
> we know this because we have artifacts that have already lasted many
> centuries.
>