What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics.
Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.
I'm not sure what kind of organisation I'd actually trust to store data for that length of time - a commercial organisation is probably going to be more effective at providing service but what commercial organisation would you trust to provide consistent service for 100 years? A Swiss bank perhaps? Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this (clearly they store data for much longer times) but aren't set up to provide customer service.
The Stora Kopparberg mining company has existed since it was granted a charter from King Magnus IV in 1347.
A few banks tend to last for a long time [1]. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena has existed for about 540 years.
Beretta, the italian firearms company, has existed for 486 years (and has been family owned the entire time).
East and West Jersey were owned by a land proprietorship for around 340 years starting from King Charles II bestowing the land to his brother James in 1664. [2]
At first I thought multinational corporations would be more stable because they could move from land to land to avoid wars and such. But apparently they haven't lasted nearly as long as their single-nation counterparts.
The Knights Templar were granted a multi-national tax exemption by Pope Innocent II in 1139, and lasted almost 200 years until most of their leadership was killed off in 1307.
The Dutch East India Trading Company was one of the first [modern] multinational corporations, spanning almost 200 years from 1602-1798.
However, the longest-lasting companies have been family owned and operated. [3] [4]
It appears most all companies that have lasted a long time are due to two factors: dealing in basic goods and services that all humans need, and looking ahead to the future to change with the times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks [2] https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nYQU4NpfD74J:... [3] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-05-14/centuries-old... [4] http://www.bizaims.com/content/the-100-oldest-companies-worl...
I don't consider that obvious. I live in Berlin, the capital of what most would consider a stable country, but my apartment (which is even older) has been a part of 5 different countries in the last 100 years (German Empire, Weinmar Republic, Nazi Germany, East Germany and finally, the Federal Republic of Germany).
Of course, predicting future stability is complete guesswork!
The oldest country (not government) is likely Vietnam (2897 BCE). Other contenders: Japan (660 BCE), China (221 BCE), Ethiopia (~800 BCE), or Iran (678 BCE).
Few of today's modern states pre-date the 19th Century, many antedate World War II or the great de-colonialisation of the 1960s including much of Africa and Oceana (some of the longest inhabited regions of Earth).
Among the more long-lived institutions are the Catholic Church (traditionally founded by Jesus ~30 AD, emerging as an institutional power in 2nd Century Rome). The oldest company I can find is Kongo Gumi, founded in 578, a Japanese construction firm. The record however is likely held by the Shishi Middle School founded in China between 143 and 141 BCE.
My own suggestion would be the Krell, though some might disqualify this based on a requirement for human organization.
I would say a stable country is one which has had a legit democracy for 70 or so years and doesn't share a border with a non-democratic / non-legit-democratic state. These two points suggests its unlikely to have a revolution or be invaded any time soon.
Of course, if you look at the UK governments track record with IT.. you wouldn't trust it. I would say the same with the US, especially in concern with data security.
[NB I'm not English]
Japan (660 BCE) and China (221 BCE) have both had feudal / bureaucratic governments exhibiting very high levels of stability. While dynasties and eras are marked, the overall states persisted largely intact.
Having a long history obviously isn't a predictor of future stability. According to the Long Now Foundation site [2], a Japanese company that existed since 578CE went bust in 2007.
[1] http://www.bizaims.com/content/the-100-oldest-companies-worl... [2] http://blog.longnow.org/02008/06/13/the-100-oldest-companies...
As recently as 1870, during the Italian unification, the church was stripped of its power to govern Rome after an armed confrontation between armies at the gates of Rome ("XX Septembre"). During this period, the Pope (the ninth Pius) seriously considered fleeing Italy.
If you can figure out a way to convince a few dozen people every decade that the best way to glorify God is to isolate themselves off somewhere maintaining your archival data, you'll be set for centuries.
Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) have entered our economy, that's a question begging to be answered.
Amazon at least seems to be an "eventually durable" datastore, though. Meaning that if you are told in the future that it will go offline, you have an excellent chance to make other suitable arrangements. Say there's a 0.01% chance of this product being discontinued next year, up to a 10% chance 5 years from now. I have to think there will almost certainly be other services you can move your data to, on similar terms, for a long time.
That's assuming you're around at all, and nothing reeeeeally bad happens even so. Making data last after your death (or even after you stop paying!) is a lot harder in this environment, and achieving true 100-year durability is a tough nut indeed.
I like your bank idea, since the preservation of a bank account is just a specialized simple case of data preservation. Data preservation seems rather more reliable when the data is directly attached to money. Then again, maybe banks themselves are on their way out for this purpose — Dropbox could become the new safety-deposit box.
But there are 100-year domain registrations, after all. Maybe we're ready for organizations to at least offer 100-year storage, too.
FWIW, we are happy to support this kind of use, and see our customers doing it in an ad-hoc way every day. We have s3cmd in our environment, and support it. As soon as their is a glacier complement to s3cmd we will put that into place as well, although with the strange traffic and retrieval pricing, I'm not sure how useful folks will find it ...
You could have a foundation established to choose and pay an array of commercial organizations that do the archiving.
As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?).
I'd store my pictures there. Finding old pictures of grandparents when they were little, or even older stuff, is amazing. Wouldn't it be cool if my descendants could still look at pictures of my family in 100 years?
Provided that downloading from this 100 year store is something I could do X times per year, and so long as I could append more data to it over time, it's an interesting business model.
But that's from when it was harder to make and upload data, so people only put meaningful (to them) stuff online. These days we'd have a hundred thousand copies of a few popular MP3's and everyone's crappy digital photos. The percentage of meaningful stuff would be a lot lower.
"Long Data, LLC... We secure your data for the long-term".