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Thanks For the ... Eight-Track, Uncle Alex

Posted by kdawson on from the redundancy-and-repetition dept.

Uncle Alex writes "My niece just turned one year old and her parents have asked that, instead of the usual gifts, we each contribute something to a time capsule to be opened on her 17th birthday. Multiple members of my family want to contribute digital data — text, video, music files. They came to me (the closest thing to a geek our family has) wondering: what's the best way to save the data to ensure she'll actually be able to see it in 16 years? Software might be out of date, hardware may no longer be used... any suggestions?"

6 of 633 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Think back 17 years by slim · · Score: 3, Informative

    I still have music CDs that I purchased in the 1970's that are still usable :)

    1982 at the earliest.

    But there is a difference between a pressed CD - which can last for a very long time - and a CDR which decays surprisingly quickly.

  2. Re:Think back 17 years by bamf · · Score: 4, Informative

    I still have music CDs that I purchased in the 1970's that are still usable :)

    A pretty good trick since they weren't commercially available until late '82 :)

  3. CD's are still around but to be sure... by Time_Warped · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would include a player for any media you have. I am still trying to cope with all my Mom's trays of slides...Oh, and make sure you include descriptions of the participants, I have a lot of old slides of people I presume are cousins, but I am not sure exactly who they are....

  4. If you can't remember that far back, wikipedia it. by argent · · Score: 4, Informative

    20 years ago, an 8track would have been the thing to store information on.

    20 years ago CDs were almost 10 years old, and 8-track was already "20 years ago, and you'd have a hard time finding a player".

  5. Re:Pretty easy by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Most flash memory only quotes a retention time of a decade or so. Whether that is optimistic or pessimistic is not yet clear.

  6. Re:Pretty easy by DrLang21 · · Score: 4, Informative

    What if USB ports disappear like PS/2, Centronics, and serial connections have disappeared?

    This is a non-issue as you have described it. I just built a brand new computer 5 months ago. I was not interested in any of those items listed, yet it has a parallel port, a serial port, and two PS/2 ports. It's actually unfortunate that they don't make a RS-232 flash drive because the serial port is not going anywhere for a very long time. You might need to purchase a special card in the future to have it, but it is far too convenient and easy for use with industrial controls to ever die out.

    --
    I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.