The degradation of digital information caused by hardware failure, software obsolescence, or link rot. This occurs when storage media like hard drives and magnetic tapes physically break down, or when the specific file formats and web URLs required to access the data are no longer supported by active systems.
Heard on the job
We migrated the archives to redundant cloud storage to prevent digital decay on those old magnetic tapes.
Also heard as
- bit rot
- data rot
- link rot