The floppy disk refused to die in Japan
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
The standard that they came up with is called "Archival Disc" (AD) [1] and they fulfill the requirements of 100 years (lab tested and verified) data retention. The ODA units, however, cost over 8500$ last time I checked.
As far as I know you can order them from the Panasonic Japan website and not anywhere outside Japan, but this standard has huge potential in my opinion (when compared to the absurdly overpromised mdisc, for example).
Data retention rates matter, always have an optical and a spinning HDD backup. SSDs are not guaranteed to keep data longer than 30-90 days without electricity.
SSD retention claims vary depending on the drive; and it's a trade-off between speed, durability, total writes, etc.
At reasonable room temperatures, powered-off SSDs will keep data for years.
Losing a single bit is unacceptable for archival purposes, that's why I mentioned the importance of optical and magnetic backups as a redundancy.
Sure you can probably correct file headers, but that's it. Anything that's relying on file integrity probably will go nowhere without a redundant backup to correct the data from.
I'm not talking about "good enough" == "some pixels are wrong in a jpeg file". I am talking about legally relevant documents where authenticity matters and a single bit flip might cause the court to not accept the documents as evidence.
You need to spread the files (including the redundancy codes) over enough disks that you expect to be able to access sufficient blocks in the future.
Much less known is ED 2.88MB. Only ever shipped in some 1990 IBM PS/2 and NEXT computers. 80 tracks ~100KB/s speed.
But pretty much nobody outside of Japan has ever hear about 'Triple' or '2TD' format developed and shipped by NEC in 1988 inside PC-88 VA3. 13MB unformatted, _9MB_ formatted capacity!! Triple because it tripled track density from 80 to 240 while reusing ED barium ferrite magnetic media, same ~100KB/s speed.
Could you imagine a world where we got 9MB ~100KB/s speed floppy drives in ~1990 in all computers?
But then, most of the times people use that phrase something is obviously broken.
China has now far surpassed it as cyberpunk society of the future, but Japan is basically stuck at what we thought the year 2020 was going to be like in 1980
One reason I heard is that in Tokyo at least, the usual way to communicate a location is to draw a map, often with directions from the nearest subway station. Postal addresses are hard to work with as most streets are unnamed, and usually, only local postmen and policemen can comfortably navigate with them. These maps were often sent by fax. Maybe kanji has to do with it too.
Also, it is common for people who have good access to at a time modern technology to take more time to get to the next advance, may even skip it entirely. For example Japan was along the last in the technologically advanced world to get to smartphones, because they already had really advanced featurephones while we were stuck with Nokia 3310s. So while for us, the first smartphones brought us a lot, for them, it was in many ways a downgrade.
So, for us, email was a replacement for slow and expensive mail, for them, it was a replacement for already pretty fast and effective fax machines. There is less of an incentive to change.
Another example of a silly and easily fixable problem that will likely also go unresolved for years for the same cultural reasons.
If it's not borken, don't fix it...