What I’m poking at is the layer above that: “will anyone actually understand this file in 100 years?”
Storage alone won’t cut it. You need shared context, evolving semantics, and some form of continuity in the community doing the interpreting. The Library of Alexandria kept scrolls for centuries — but once the interpretive context vanished, most of the knowledge went with it.
Think in systems.
https://longnow.org/talks/02011-kahle/
https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-permanent-leg...
> “The goal is for the endowment to provide, at the very minimum, permanent storage of users’ materials and the capability to download these materials at any time,” Friedman says. “But it’s not just the cost of storage — these fees also support an organization committed to protecting, migrating, and maintaining access to user content for all time.”
I agree the real challenge over 100-plus year timeframes isn’t storage itself, but continuity of care. Institutions like the Internet Archive handle this through organisational cohesion, endowments, and legal structure. That’s effective, but it also concentrates risk in a single organisation.
What I’m exploring is whether some of that continuity can be handled structurally rather than relying entirely on institutions - where stewardship emerges from ongoing contribution and renewal, rather than fixed roles or transferable incentives. The goal isn’t to replace institutions outright, but to reduce how much long-term survival depends on any single one.
I think your point about renewal over time is the hardest part. Sustaining motivation across generations is fundamentally a social and governance problem, and I don’t have a complete answer there yet.