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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter if the the special FRAM memory cells in this gadget are good for 200+ years. All modern electrical stuff is hellishly complex, from a materials engineering PoV, and there are many other parts of this flash drive that will likely fail in <2 centuries. Plus, why would you believe that (working) systems able to read USB drives will be available in 200+ years?

SO - unless the data you're storing is worth a major effort by future computer historians, just find an old daisy-wheel printer, and save your 8K to archival quality paper. That'll be good for a thousand years or so.

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>Plus, why would you believe that (working) systems able to read USB drives will be available in 200+ years?

This. The best long term archival media that can outlive generations has proven to be non-electronic ones (paper manuscripts, animal hides, cave paintings, rock engravings, etc).

Even if you can still find USB readers 200+ years from now when we'll all use quantum computers and wear AR headsets or neuralink implants (provided we don't extinct ourselves through war and climate change till then), there's no guarantee the systems of the future will still be able to read file systems and data formats encoded in the standards of today, but to read stuff off paper/stone all you need is your eyes, no technology.

For example, some retro computing youtubers I follow are struggling to decode 5.25" floppy data from 50 years ago because it was encoded in some niche proprietary non-standard format that modern SW has no idea about, so they have to low-level scan the magnetic flux off the things and then trial and error various encodings hoping something will stick. Meanwhile, a random small church in my country just found 500 year old books in its attic that are perfectly preserved and readable, and they have survived a church fire and over a dozen wars.

Not saying such USB drives aren't useful for a specific niche, I'm sure they are, but if you're looking for 200+ year endurance you'll definitely want to diversify your data storage to non-electronic mediums as well and not bank it all on a USB drive with new unproven technology.

> there's no guarantee the systems of the future will still be able to read file systems and data formats encoded in the standards of today

If modern society survives continuously for 200 years, I don't see any reason we couldn't read current formats if they're actually standard and/or well-documented; we can, for example, still read original unix filesystems, if nothing else by running actual original unix in (open)simh, and that's 45-50 years old already.

OK, but what about more than 200 years? What about the next civilizations?

Also, a lot can happen in 200 years that can have unforeseen effect on the FRAM of that USB stick (EMPs from nuclear explosions, solar storms, etc)

Sure, there's a reason I scoped to data formats within the continuity of this civilization (ish). I agree that the hardware side is harder (albeit not impossible for the stated target), I'm mostly trying to push back on the idea that civilization and computers will be completely unrecognizable in what is honestly not that long a timeframe in context. If you want to make something last arbitrarily long or through electronics-destroying events, then yes you should consider other options (or really, multiple options at once), but I think that's moving the goalposts.

60 years on we haven't forgotten how to read EBCDIC. Punch cards can still be deciphered. Most languages aren't unrecognizable from what they were 200 years ago. I don't think we'd have much issue reading an USB stick in 200 years.

Punch cards you cand decode with your eyes, you don't need tech for that. Good luck with USB drives in 200 years.

Even old USB 1.0 devices sometimes struggle on modern HW.

Microsoft is working on a way to modernize rock engravings by etching binary data in glass: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

Despite the claimed 10,000 year lifespan, I doubt this will satisfy the kind of hackernews who prefixes four-digit years with an '0' like 02024. We just don't know whether we will have or be able to make the machinery to read it back millennia from now. It will make a nice archival solution for businesses and governments who want a data preservation solution over a time horizon of decades to centuries, though.

>It will make a nice archival solution for businesses and governments who want a data preservation solution over a time horizon of decades to centuries, though.

I doubt it. Even governments and businesses suck at preservation: just look at game studios who loose source code of valuable IP they themselves developed 20+ years ago. People working there just don't care about something so long term when their own skin isn't in the game and they're not getting paid enough for it to care much about what happens when they're gone or what their predecessors did.

This isn't the famous Voyager space probe where people hang around well past their retirement date to keep something alive due to emotional attachment, in most cases digital data just is left to rot and die out as people leave companies/institutions and new people come in with different agendas and career goals.

Microsoft's magic Tesseract data storage cube is cool, but good luck finding the tech to read it 10k years from now when Microsoft is long gone. Written paper and cave drawings will outlive us all.

For every person saying the year is 02024 there are at least a few who are thinking "its not year 1044 decimal?"

It's likely that there will be an I2C-enabled FRAM chip on there, though there are a few other devices which could hold those FRAM cells. I2C is ubiquitous, even more so than USB, and trivial to implement. There will certainly be enough information available to access those in 200 years, even if there's no USB anymore.

> There will certainly be enough information available to access those in 200 years

Still depends on humans in 200 years having use of computers and electricity. Civilisational collapse would likely mean humans will lose those skills (like we forgot how to make cement/concrete after the fall of the Roman empire and it took 1000 years to rediscover).

The idea to start with USB at the first place is ridiculous. If it can't be printed on paper it should be based on some kind of dead simple serial protocol with relatively low baudrate so almost anyone with description of that protocol can reconstruct it on computational device used 200 years in the future.

The USB itself is thousands of lines of code for USB driver in computer and special USB physical interface as well which might not be even manufactured in 200 years.

It would be like today looking on some crazy parallel interface from 70s using non standard bit sizes (i.e 12 bit sizes bus) with complicated timing patterns and 5V TTL on physical layer if you are lucky.

To be fair it's just SPI and a big package, super easy to read even centuries from now. I don't think we will somehow forget everything about basic electronics.

Just need 3 switches and an indicator light

Not everything, but there might not be any surviving copies of the datasheet around. It's reasonably close to generic SPI flash chips that you could probably reverse engineer it, but it's not a guarantee.

Just store the datasheet on the drive! (If you can get it to fit...)

Lead time / effort / skills / equipment to access printed data after >200 years: zero / minimal / basic literacy / any light source a person can easily read by

Vs. reading data on this device, 200+ years out?

> Lead time / effort / skills / equipment to access printed data after >200 years

As long as it hasn't burned, or crumbled, or molded, or...

> find an old daisy-wheel printer

I'm definitely on board with the analog approach, but this is interesting. What's the reason for recommending a daisy-wheel printer compared to other printing technologies? Is it just that the deformation caused by the impact of the type serves as additional redundancy or is the ink (or its adhesion to the paper) somehow superior to other printing processes in this regard?

My Reason: Low-tech ink, with a long-established track record of Just Working over long periods of time. (The deformation might help in corner cases such as poor storage conditions.) Vs. the plastic in laser printer toner might disintegrate in a few centuries, and chemical engineers may not know all the ways that modern inkjet formulations could degrade over time.

>Plus, why would you believe that (working) systems able to read USB drives will be available in 200+ years?

Unless we hit another Dark Ages, I think its safe to assume the USB standard will survive.

This gadget is still interesting for its price. It's about as expensive as 50 sheets of archival quality paper and a lot more convenient.

If you want to assure durability there are better methods. Good paper, parchment, fired clay, or high tech ideas like storing data in glass. But in terms of easy and cheap methods for one or two human lifespans this occupies a niche (together with archival-quality CDs and the like)

> That'll be good for a thousand years or so

Unless a dog eats it

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