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I think this is more like The Rosetta Project.

Hrm. Maybe the Rosetta Project has a solution...350,000 pages of text(not binary) ona 3" nickel disk.(Microscope required)

[...] our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. Our intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures. [...] The resulting archive will be publicly available in three different media: a micro-etched nickel disk with 2,000 year life expectancy; a single-volume monumental reference book; and through this growing online archive.

There is still the problem that it uses our current language and characters, so you need to know at least one language to figure it out.

I think creating an abstract communication bootstrap procedure would be fun, if you want to start such a project, please reply or email me at d31337(di4g@ch33rful.c0m)(or see homepage).

Clay Tablets, they seem to have the best proven track record for data as a whole. Of course, if you have the money, you can always use a norsam disk, they may last even longer than clay- but I doubt they're cheaper. Of course, for large amounts of data, storage is a problem.

Seriously, there should be a digital->clay device, like a printer or something, for super-archival 4000 year proven quality at a bargain. I have thought about making one for a while- a sort of dot-matrix for clay. I think it would be fun!

I think it depends on what information one considers important. The more different information you have, the less durable each corpuscle of it is. The more identical, permanent, memorable information you have, the more durable it will be. Of course, I think it would be difficult to put audio on a clay tablets, but not lyrics. We have the songs to Inanna by Enheduanna even today- that's some star power.

Oddly enough, there is a project doing that.

The Rosetta Project Technology page

They are apparently trying to produce a modern Rosetta stone of contemporary languages that will be microetched into a disk of nickel. Check out the main page.

I also thought there was another site somewhere about other products that were basically CD's etched in stone, but can't seem to find it now.

Oddly enough, there is a project doing that.

The Rosetta Project Technology page

They are apparently trying to produce a modern Rosetta stone of contemporary languages that will be microetched into a disk of nickel. Check out the main page.

I also thought there was another site somewhere about other products that were basically CD's etched in stone, but can't seem to find it now.

...but short of carving your bits on rocks or etching them onto gold plates, I don't think you'd find anything better.

However, these results cannot be extrapolated to very long times because chemical changes in the environment that may take place with time were not taken into account.

can be found here.

It's either much harder or much easier to read, depending on your point of view.

It looks a lot like Long Bets, which has been around for quite some time. It was launched as a spin-off of Danny Hillis's Long Now Foundation. Other interesting projects of theirs include the Rosetta Project and the 10,000 year clock.

For the ultimate backup use the Rosetta Disk. It sez that they can record up to 30,000 pages of text on a 3inch coin. Plain text toboot, no binary. It is actually pretty cool check it out.

10000 year storage life, analog storage format, can be read with simple optical tools, 350,000 pages on a single 3 inch dia disk.

Any machine-readable-only media must be constantly 'refreshed' and maintained over the years, unlike a nice paper book.

the New Rosetta Project has the right idea...

--jeff++

lead is too soft, and tends to melt in fire, try nickel

I remembered that The Long Now Foundation had done some work on problems like this. They have an interesting solution.

Storing your data in a format you can scan back in, yet it lasts for hundreds of years seems like a neat idea.

hi Pohl!

The next best thing to rock and chisel.

This is exactly the kind of problem that Danny Hillis and the The Long Now Foundation have been pointing out for years. Digital data doesn't last.

"Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s."

That's why they started the 10k year library project. A part of this project that interests me especially is the Rosetta Project. It's a "near permanent archive of 1,000 languages". It's still a work in progress, so I hope they succeed. In my eyes it's definitely a worthwhile endeavour.

No matter how cheap HDs get, they just don't have the [...] lifetime

Really, it depends on what you mean by "lifetime". Even assuming the media is still good, try finding a working drive for an arbitrary backup from a decade or two ago. And longer than that? Forget it. (But it's plausible that CDs will be an exception.)

For moderately long-term storage, your best bet is stone, although some metals are a good choice, too. But really, the only currently successful medium for real long-term storage is DNA. That's not because DNA is durable; it's because Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.

So the lesson is that if you really want to be able to get at your backups in the future, the best way is to keep them 1) live, 2) distributed, 3) replicated, and 4) monitored. Whether you do that by colocating a couple of hard drive arrays or by encoding the data into bacterial DNA with checksum-linked apoptosis mainly depends on your budget.

The Long Now Foundation is using analog technology for their Rosetta Disk project. This project aims to make a permanent archive of the worlds languages.

This technology is by far the best way to create permenant archives that will be impervious to all the problems associated with digital data.

There are two facinating projects. The first is in response to your point: the need for a modern rosetta stone. The second is just darned cool.

Check them out:

Rosetta Project
Long Now Project

uuh...NO. they arent a backup medium. ever read the warranty information on the box ? they are most certainly NOT a backup medium. CDR's, AIT/DLT tapes are a backup medium.

uuh...NO. CDRs and magnetic tapes have lifespans measured in mere decades.

This is a backup medium. If it can't last 10,000 years submerged in salt water or in a mountain cave, I'm not interested.

(HHOS)

... a lot can change.

The Egyptian dynasties were around a mere 3000 years ago, our earliest examples of writing less than 6000 years ago. We can't decipher those early writings. And how many of their relics still exist? where now are the cities of Akkad, Ur, Uruk?

Now add 4000 more years and work out what will be left. How many buildings or artifacts last this long? What will climatic changes and geological changes will happen to any location on the planet?

It's a great and worthy problem of our own making for people to solve. I heard the US military were looking at this problem a few years ago and came up with a symbolic language to mark out high level radiation dumps. Can anybody give me a reference to this?

It's also worth checking out the Long Now Foundation for their work on a 10,000 year clock and The Rosetta Project looking to create written artifiacts that will physically survive and be decipherable in a time period twice as long as the history of the written word so far...

What ever the solution we owe it to our future generations to sort it out. I wonder though if we're so fixed on short term plans and desires that we won't be able to dedicate the energy to making it happen. Sixty years after the nuclear age began and we're already finding that our leaders attitude towards nuclear waste is just to dump it out of sight and mind.

There already is such a format...well, sort of.

The Rosetta Project

We can argue that this project is only meant to store languages, but that's not a true barrier to the disk's use. I suppose we could also argue high cost, but I'm a market economy advocate... ^_^