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Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, actual museum-grade archival is so much more than just having an aging-resistant media. You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee - you can't assume the future generations will know how to make a reading device and remember your formats/encodings. So it's a bit like unzip.zip problem.

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http://rosettaproject.org/

>For the extreme longevity version of the Rosetta database, we have selected a new high density analog storage device as an alternative to the quick obsolescence and fast material decay rate of typical digital storage systems. This technology, developed by Los Alamos Laboratories and Norsam Technologies, can be thought of as a kind of next generation microfiche. However, as an analog storage system, it is far superior. A 2.8 inch diameter nickel disk can be etched at densities of 200,000 page images per disk, and the result is immune to water damage, able to withstand high temperatures, and unaffected by electromagnetic radiation. This makes it an ideal backup for a long-term text image archive. Also, since the encoding is a physical image (no 1's or 0's), there is no platform or format dependency, guaranteeing readability despite changes in digital operating systems, applications, and compression algorithms.

>Reading the disk requires a microscope, either optical or electron, depending on the density of encoding and could be combined with an Optical Character Recognition system to read the text back into digital formats relevant at the time of reading. We are keeping our encoding at a scale readable by a 1000X optical microscope, giving us a total disk storage capacity of around 30,000 pages of text.

Wouldn't one have to encase this in a diamond shell or something to avoid scraping it?

By a delightful coincidence, there's another article on the front page of HN today that is relevant to the interpretability problem you're alluding to; see the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264848

This is where things like microfilm have an advantage- the only knowledge needed to decode it is magnification and the language it’s written in.

I’ve been wondering lately how well you could do with a microfilm strip full of 2d barcodes prefixed by an optical copy of the relevant specifications.

relevant: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf talks about archiving computer programs so they may be read by future civilizations

>You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee

Not really, those future people don't just come out of nowhere. It's a gradual, incremental change as there are still systems using tape storage the technology or formats are not lost but migrated.

That depends on the time scales we're talking about. 30 years? Probably (and even then there are problems with abandoned/little-documented formats like Word 3.x). 300 years, and a historian will have a hard time decoding a digital file from the year 2019, even assuming the media is still intact. 3000 years and a nuclear war can make a weird shiny disc appear as a currency or a cult item for an archaeologist, not as a knowledge storage.

This assumes an unbroken chain of people devoting time and resources to migrating the data. Any gap would mean that data is lost or requires much more expense to recover.

Find a 3.5" floppy disk from 1995 with WordPerfect files on it and see how much effort it takes you to get the documents back. Now imagine 100 years have passed.

think nuclear war that wipes out 99.999% of earths human population. Even the few computers that remain would become useless because there's no power, fall apart due to degredation/weathering, and ignored because people will have much higher priorities like finding food and surviving, than preserving what would then be the previous generation's technology.

Just put the instructions in a plain txt file as the first file on the disc.

you'd have to know the (physical) reading mechanism (plus encoding) to read the README.txt itself.

That's why you put the ASCII encoding as well, plus the blueprints for a digital computer capable of running EMACS to decode it.

Well encoding is not an issue. Any civilisation who have the physical means to read the disc will be able to figure out the encoding fairly simply.

It isn't that simple, many lost languages have only been restored because of the dual language books.

Similarly, I think what matters here is the higher-order redundancy. A single encoding that can be lost, is not straightforward to figure out, and holds the clue to a massive storage, isn't the most future proof decision; it's a single point of failure.

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