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authorGravatar Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>2011-03-04 12:31:01 -0400
committerGravatar Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>2011-03-04 12:31:01 -0400
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+Imagine putting a git-annex drive in a time capsule. In 20, or 50, or 100
+years, you'd like its contents to be as accessible as possible to whoever
+digs it up.
+
+This is a hard problem. git-annex cannot completly solve it, but it does
+its best to not contribute to the problem. Here are some aspects of the
+problem:
+
+* How are files accessed? Git-annex carefully adds minimal complexity
+ to access files in a repository. Nothing needs to be done to extract
+ files from the repository; they are there on disk in the usual way,
+ with just some symlinks pointing at the annexed file contents.
+ Neither git-annex nor git is needed to get at the file contents.
+
+* What file formats are used? Will they still be readable? To deal with
+ this, it's best to stick to plain text files, and the most common
+ image, sound, etc formats. Consider storing the same content in multiple
+ formats.
+
+* What filesystem is used on the drive? Will that filesystem still be
+ available?
+
+* What is the hardware interface of the drive? Will hardware still exist
+ to talk to it?