Japan's digital minister declares 'war' on humble floppy disk in new digital push

The Japan Times ^ | August 31, 2022 | Bloomberg

[BenLurkin]

The world was a better place with yesterday’s technology.

Heck, it was a better place with the technology from the day before yesterday.

[TangoLimaSierra]

. Hanko stamp.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

hanko stamps are not going out of fashion anytime soon.

Say a package is delivered to your door. Instead of signing for it, you just use your little stamp to indicate receipt.

Think of a rubber stamp with your signature on it, but with a face about the size of a dime.

[Libloather]

[MayflowerMadam]

What about mag cards?

[zeugma]

Dealing with older tech like this is an interesting problem. Another is that you pretty much have to eventually transfer data to newer formats. This is a huge issue. Let's say you had some corporate data that was stored on floppies. As technology advanced, if you didn't want to lose that data, you needed to copy all of the data to new media. My personal progression for this kind of thing was from floppies to cdroms, then from cdroms to DVDs. Now I pretty much use hard drives for long term archival, though for some really important stuff SD cards are preferred.

One issue that you run into is finding older data. You have to file things intelligently, or the data might as well not exist, because you can't locate it when you need it. The amount of data lost either because the old media became corrupted, or simply can't be located is pretty much incalculable. This has always been the case, even when stuff was on paper. Unless the data is well organized, it can never be located. It is also susceptible to damage to water, fire, mold, and other stuff.

NASA has lost so much data due to bit-rot while records were sitting on old 1/2" and 9-track tape, that's its really not funny.

This is an ongoing problem in society. Sometimes, important stuff is lost due to mismanagement, sometimes it's not so important. I have a couple of old tapes (IIRC, they were QIC tapes) that I would really love to get transferred to something newer, but basically lost out because the window on the tech pretty much closed before I could do so unless I want to spend stupid amounts of money attempting to recover it.

Things like real estate transaction records (which are necessary to get clear title) have pretty much vanished into digital smoke because people weren't thinking ahead about data preservation.