18 February 2021 Historians and archivists have expressed concerns about the Digital Dark Age for decades. The short life span of storage hardware (about 7 years for SSDs under stress, 30 years for HDDs, and 100/200 years for optical discs under climate-controlled conditions only) inverts our relationship with primary sources. […]

21 January 2021 The advent of big data challenges long-held assumptions in historical research. The 59 zettabytes of data generated until 2020 reside in fragile storage devices with an average life span of 7 to 30 years. Unlike paper documents, the networked existence of big data across hundreds of thousands […]