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Originally Posted by rkomar
Imagine if that document is your hospital's record of birth, or city's record of deed to your property. What happens when such important records are no longer readable?
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You really can't compare such official records to your personal letters from yesteryear. The institution in charge, the city, the government do take care of these things. Sometimes it's actually the other way round: we've had a land registry here in my country for 225+ years. The old ledgers still exist, but nobody except a few specialists would be able to read them. Good thing they have all been put into an official database. The system has been changed twice in the last 30 years, and undoubtedly will again in the future, but the records are still safe and, in fact, looked up daily thousands of times (more so than before, too, because you no longer need to make that trip to the county's office of official records.)
We need not be overly concerned with official records, I think. It's private data that we consider "nice to have" but not important enough to convert with every change in technology that's most likely to be lost.
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Encrypted files are just the ultimate example of a proprietary format just waiting to be unreadable
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Very true.