There is also cassette tapes, reels, wax cylinders, laser discs⌠Analog supports degrade over time. Digital files do not.
Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage thatâs good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.
The analog storage you are referring to from thousands of years ago has degraded substantially since its creation. Yes itâs still useful but I wouldnât use that as evidence itâs a better medium. Case in point: texts (a digital storage form) from thousands of years ago can be retransacribed to be exact copies of the original (with respect to the knowledge contained within of course) whereas paintings from the Renaissance have changed dramatically due to aging and can never be returned to their original form since the needed data is lost.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is⌠a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
Digital files have checksums. You literally know when something has changed and you lost information. And then you have error-correction on top.
How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didnât copy it to another one a checksum wonât help you.