Is there any digital data storage hardware and associated encoding that has an intended archival life of at least 1000 years without electricity?
I know it's an old question, but given that paper or palm leaf manuscripts last that long, is there any standard out there which would support civilizational timescales?
No bonus points for guessing why I'm wondering about this.
While for example we now easily have the tech to engrave literal libraries on to thin granite sheets .... and maybe even could include some sound (using good old grammophone basics;)).
To effectively store huge amounts of arbitrary data this way... You will still need electricity and computers to read back qr coded information for example.
Oh yeah and you definitely need some way to give the future historians information about how actually to decode it... (Hhhmm... will anyone in a thousand years still know BASIC maybe? ;))
@yetiinabox No. What's worse is that it isn't just a media durability problem or even a drive hardware durability problem. It is also a problem of how to preserve the knowledge about how data is laid out on the medium, the format of the data itself, and finally how that data on the disk translates into understandable data. Classic computer stuff and computer history stuff are hobbies of mine. We often run into this problem even going back a few years even when we have perfect capability to read the data storage mechanism. We often talk about how the modern era will probably not be preserved as well out thousands of years as the ancient civilizations were because of how much more ephemeral our data storage is.
Yep. Reading old scripts can be a challenge, though usually for materials < 2000 years old it's not too tricky. But encoding things depends on the affordances of the medium (sending electrical impulses down a wire is different to carving printing blocks) and if it has to be self-documenting then it's a huge challenge. Some sort of highly durable medium that is tightly packaged with a simple reader which offers miminal info on the underlying format, all of which can be forgotten for a millenium and recharge from solar panels or some such?
@yetiinabox The first time I ran across the practicality of extraction problem was in college. We had all the old drives to read the disks. Finding drivers to use the drives on modern computers was a challenge. Once parallel ports went the way of the dodo it would have been even harder. But even once we could get to the disks we didn't have software that could read the files themselves to get the data out. What about just using the file format documentation to write custom software to read it? We couldn't find anything specifying the format.
@hankg
I can't help seeing this as another casualty of the hyperindividualism that has plagued humanity for some centuries now. At the level of an individual this problem is all but invisible, but at the level of collective culture we have recreated ourselves with extrasomatic cognitive storage that is incredibly fragile and ephemeral. If I told you that you had the choice to remember much more for five years, but after that sink into senile dementia, would anyone want to choose the former?
The move from oral to written caused huge changes, and it still costs us something -- dyslexia, the loss of storytelling, and eventually the commodification of writing -- but this seem far more fraught given the guaranteed material instability of the next few centuries.
And of course I find myself wondering: whom does this amnesia serve? Does it render the majority of us more pliable to explotation?
All of my volumes of data on 8mm DAT tapes from early decades is essentially lost.
Also...
I'm not buying/ repairing/ maintaining a working BetaSP deck for any of the BetaSP tapes.
Also...
The sVHS tapes even less worth it.
Also...
And as for the 16, super16 & 35 footage. Forget it.
Data has become incredibly perishable in our society.
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