If you want it to last, put it on paper, and learn how to do that correctly for long term storage. Digital media doesn't last decades. They used to have floppy disks about eight by eight inches in the eighties. Try reading that now. In the fifties, computer data was on paper punch cards and reel to reel tape. I have a screenplay on a small floppy disk from ten years ago. Do you or any of your friends have a disk drive? There are paper manuscripts thousands of years old that can be read today.
I agree in that printing text onto paper using a laser printer is a very good way to store text, its far more resilient than digital copies, however in a fire I would much rather just grab a small shoebox full of archival quality DVD's than 5 boxes full or more of heavy paper.
It might be a good/wise idea to make sure that the toner that is in the laser printer isnt acid based and could eventually eat through the paper.
With paper as a storage medium it also requires that the paper not be treated before hand with any acids and that bacteria from your hands doesnt build up and multiply over time inside of a vacuum sealed bag and eat the paper from the inside.
The same issue arises with Optical mediums like CD/DVD, in the early days of Laserdiscs they had issues with a thing called laserrot, which is basically the internal surface of the aluminium coating has become exposed to the outside air and begins to oxidize, ironically the most common title for this to occur on Laserdisc was the movie called Eraser :P
But its kinda difficult to preserve moving pictures on paper, and without an expensive laser color printer, printing out still photos is a dire prospect too as inkjet photos will run if they get wet, they are not colorfast.
I do have a 3 1/4" Floppy drive actually, I used to also have a 5 1/2" floppy drive aswell, even have floppies but I never use them anymore.
The reasons are valid but I think that a media as handy as DVD or Bluray will be around for a while longer yet, mainly because it is a direct replacement for film, and people have a lot of memories on film, so there is going to be a need for a substitute, DVD and bluray is that medium for now, this will change over time as newer mediums like super-bluray come onto the market, and the next sucessor, and the one after that.
With floppy disk, you required a specific read/write magnetic combo that read only one specific disk size with one specific data density or two or three at a time. then that was over and done with and replaced with CD-ROM or CD-Recordable or CD-ReWriteable and USB Flash.
With CD/DVD/Bluray all you need is a laser, or a laser with more than one diode for different operating wavelengths.
For example it was reddish/near-infrared 780nm for CD, red/650nm laser for DVD and blue/Violet 405nm lasers for Bluray, they all use the exact same disc dimensions and so are therefore readable by the same player.
As long as the physical medium stays relativley the same size there should be a drive able to play it out there for at least the next 30-50 years.
I wouldnt want to store anything on a hard drive, even if the hard drive is reliable and is going to last for the next 30 years or more while sitting unpowered ontop of a shelf, the motherboard standards, AT/ATA/SATA1.0, SATA2.0, SATA3.0 have all changed and are changing connector sizes as they go along. Ontop of that they have difficulties with the onboard controller electronics going south at random moments and giving out the magic blue smoke. The real problem and concern with storage on hard drives is that just as with floppy disk, the supporting hardware, a computer with an ATA port, is getting very very old by now.
You can get cheap adapter converter cables/cards which will convert ATA or SATA to USB, but its hardly trustworthy.
There was a great deal of differing ISO standards for how to write to a CD back in the 90s, but I think that has settled down now, those are mainly operating system standards anyway which can be worked around in operating system emulation.
Here is the sucessor, and the drives are going to be backward compatible yet again:
http://www.ign.com/a...ssor-to-blu-rayWhat you can do also, is when a new media comes onto the market, you buy into that new media, and then change to a different media when the old one becomes obsolete, copying the same data over and over again.
The problem with this last method is errors appearing gradually over time in the content, there needs to be a perfect bit for bit copy.
And duplicates need to be made on a competing brand than the first lot, so that one whole batch of bad archival DVD's or Bluray's dont destroy your entire lot.
Edited by Layberinthius, 25 August 2013 - 12:23 AM.
preservation, storage
