Since storage constantly gets cheaper, 100GB first stored in 2001 can be stored on updated media for a fraction of that original cost in 2024.
I think I read this quote on Tim Bray's blog[0], but I am not sure anymore. This is now my approach, my short/middle term archival is designed to be easily transferred to the next short/middle term store on a regular basis. I started with 500GB drives, now I am at 14TB.
Even the floppies were a step up from paper tape - the older guys used to have a cupboard of paper tapes on coathangers, and linked their code by feeding the tapes through the reader in the right order.
Kids these days etc :)
Back in the 90's to 00's a friend had a collection of cd's that he'd written, but he stored them in a big sleeved folder container. The container itself caused them to warp slightly, which made them unusable.
I took a few for testing and managed to unbend them after some time, which turned them back into a working state.
[Note: That's the most apostrophes I've ever used in a sentence, it feels dirty]
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch09/ps...
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/P...
If I remember right I just stacked a few starting on the floor with a protective layer in-between so as to not scratch them (a piece of paper is fine). Then add a 5kg or whatever weight on top. After a few days I turned them over and did the same again.
After that most were flat, only one or two needed some more individual time. I imagine that if after that if they're still not flat them maybe heating them slightly in the oven or even just the sun outside might do the trick.
Some kind of 'barcode' encoding, with heavy error correction, would probably be better. I've seen attempts that claim 500kB per side using a largely unmodified QR code system, but I suspect better could be achieved - the method of scanning is probably going to be the bottleneck anyway.
Stone tablets, on the other hand, are rock solid.
(Pun intended)
Unless we could improvise something with old-school dot matrix impact heads to print on clay - I wonder if anyone has tried.
https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
Just one article discussing it. Do you have a source to back this up? M-DISCs are getting hard to purchase these days, and I have a lot of stuff I want to put on them which I likely will want to look at in 30 years.
"Instead, the M-DISC™’s data layer is composed of rock-like materials known to last for centuries. The M-DISC READY™ Drive etches the M-DISC™’s rock-like layer creating a permanent physical data record that is immune to data rot. The stability and longevity of the M-Disc DVD has been proven in rigorous tests conducted according to the ISO/IEC 10995 test standard for determining data lifetime of optical media."
Tape also has a problem shared with hard disks - to achieve high density we've rapidly hit a stage where the technology is too complex to enable data archeology at some point in the future; using 90s era complexity hard drives is about where the archeological limit is. LTO-1 may even be beyond that complexity compared to DLT, QIC or even Data8 (helical scan may be too much of a spanner in the works)
Modern polymers may make microfiche/microfilm a longer term solution than it has been in the past with acetate film/slides, but I'm not sure how much research has been done into which polymers might be best.
For longer than a century, our best experience is, thus far, with clay and paper (assuming good quality acid-free paper, rather than cheap modern consumer paper).
The ones I've used were photo developed, but that doesn't mean there aren't printed fiches too.
Mid to late 90s we also got the metall audio tapes that are even better. I got a few DAT tapes from the early 90s that are in same league as metall audio tapes.
Assuming you store your own players, and have a convertor from USB to whatever exists in fifty years, is that a real solution?
What killed the last one was an experiment with installing Emby. Like many similar systems, it bewilderingly has no rate-limiting function, and will thrash a disk to within an inch of its life in order to index it. And that was the most recent thing that killed one of my external Plex drives, with multiple series and movies on it.
So yes, just keep refreshing the media, at reasonable intervals.
PS Yes, I know this is a poor method of content storage. NAS is looming up for me one of these days.
AFAIK large data centers automate something like this.