As elon musk’s department of government efficiency (dog) Continues to Reshape the US Government’s Digital Infrastructure – SCRApping Websites, Eliminating Jobs, Eliminating Jobs, and Disaster Departments – Charchivists have been racing to preserve a vanishing record of public history.
For months, Volunteers have worked to undo the damage caused by doge’s mass deletion and rewriting of federal websites. But now they face a different challenge: not destruction, but misguided innovation.
Earlier this month, dog announced on x it would save $ 1 million annual by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes of government records Into “Permanent Modern Digital Records.” The problem? No digital medium is truly period
Unlike Past Changes to Government Archives, this move does not appear to be Malicious. INTEAD, it seems driven by a tech-bro fondness for the new and a disregard for the old. (Musk did not respond to Fast company‘s request for comment.)
Many assume cloud storage is infallible, but it still relieves on physical hardware – Hardware that can fail. “Typical in my experience.. of Science and Technology. “The Saving is $ 1 Million, but what is the cost (of the overall project)?” 6
Cloud Systems Experience 1% to 2% Hardware Failure Annually, with hard drives wearing out in three to five years. In contrast, magnetic tapes have error rates four to five magnitudes lower than hard drives and last Around 30 years. “Tapes have a very long life. If you have ssds, data decays much faster,” di pietro says. “Every five years you need to move data.. And that’s a cost.”
Others say Doge’s Announcement Lacks Clarity. “When it comes to Archiving, You Well May Have Different Goals,” Says Peter Zaitsev, Cofounder of the Open-SOURCE SOFTWARE Developer Percona. Offline magnetic tapes are more secure and long-long, but harder to access than cloud storage. “For data which must be kept ‘forever’ but also needs to have easy on-demand access, storage both in the modern cloud…
