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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic but relevant to the aging problem of tech: is there any commonly-available persistent storage medium you would use to store say, family movies for 100 years? Or is that a hopeless cause? For instance, will BluRay players be around for much longer? USB drives?

At what point are we where "Either put it in the cloud or lose it" is the law of tech?

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I think it is safe to say you have to plan on moving media you care about to a different format every couple decades. From the first Edison wax cylinders, to today's latest format, the technology has changed that often, and if you care you have to follow. Sure you can keep older stuff working and some do. You can also say the same about photographs and books: most degrade after a few decades, but there if you spend $$$ you can get archival grade that will last for a century or two (many centuries if you store in a desert, but in human friendly places a century is all you should count on).

I have some archival grade CDs and DVDs that claim they will last longer. However I'm not sure if readers will exist as long as the media.

I've always wondered if you could do something with dot-matrix-on-aluminum-foil. It wouldn't look the prettiest and the information density would be low, but it seems like it would be cheap and last forever.

The scene mentioning the big EMP-reset in Blade Runner 2049 made me wonder just how much would be lost to us in such a scenario. Much that we care about is currently on highly sensitive storage.

What format should I invest in (developing/purchasing/etc) that would A) be easy-ish to read from B) be dense enough to exceed the point I might as well just be using paper/glass slides/microfiche/and so on, and could be ramped back up from pretty crude tech.

Combine "end of civilization", "time-travelling with tech", and other thought-experiment scenarios for fun.

If it is end of civilization you care about then print out survival instructions. Basic low tech things that one person can do in a farm sized area with minimal help.

Don't worry about advanced stuff. How to make a transistor will be lost long before we develop a new civilization capable of needing transistors. So don't waste paper on it.

Every couple decades? More like every 5 years!

Depends on the format. Some have lasted longer than others. I just migrated my grandparents slides from the 1960s and 1970s.

I bet I could probably put movies and media on a BluRay using whatever format was the most stable over the past ten years and be sure that it would be readable by somebody without too much trouble 20 years from now. After that, however, planned obsolesce gets you.

I guess this is the first time I've faced the fact that unless it is printed out at archival quality in some manner that humans can read, it basically won't exist 200 years from now. The data will perhaps be around in some kind of conglomerated and bowdlerized format, but the "you" part of the data will be lost in obscurity, and that's assuming that some version of the cloud stays intact that long.

Odd.

Copy it to all your computing devices, and keep doing that when you get new ones.

Thanks. I was looking for something that would work without me being around or there being any kind of script or computer for somebody to maintain. Something akin to a family picture album, only with digital media

I suppose you could always laser etch your bits on gold film and store it in a secure container. There are some products out there like the M disk that claim to last up to 1,000 years, but typical consumer storage media are only expected to last a few decades under optimal conditions.

https://www.mdisc.com/

We had a conversaton about this on Ars Technica and I can't currently find it. We ran into the same findings. I don't think you can fully set and forget it....3 copies, two formats, 1 off-site

And plan to copy to new media every 8-10 years.

I wouldn't count on 'put it in the cloud' being the answer, for a number of reasons.

Personally, I think that the only answer to the "preserve the family stuph for a 100 years" is to migrate it all to the most reliable media available every 5-10 years (it used to be every 3-5 years). Even if there was an archival media that was 100% reliable 100 years from now, will there be something that can read it?

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