Ask Slashdot: Storing Items In a Sealed Chest For 25 Years?

New submitter accet87 writes "We are celebrating the Silver Jubilee of our graduation next month and have come up with an idea where we will build an air-tight chest in which each of us will deposit something and will open the chest only on our Golden Jubilee, i.e. after another 25 years. I want to understand what kind of items can be safely stored for 25 years and what kind of precautions are required to be taken. I am sure things like paper, non-ferrous metallic objects, wood, etc., will hold up well. What about data storage electronically? I don't think CD/DVDs, etc., will be usable. Even if the data is retained, reading it in 2037 may be a challenge."

Comments

Re:Put stuff in sealed plastic cases?

[cpu6502]

You don't have a 5 and 1/4 inch drive? :-o Put in the whole PC. I recently uncovered an old laptop at work with Windows 3.1 and it was fun playing with it again. (Mainly reinforcing what I already knew: Microsoft Windows prior to 95 and NT4 was complete garbage.)

It will be fun to look at the old Windows XP or Vista OS and say, "Man things were primitive back then. Only 2 gig of RAM? How did they ever manage to run with so little?"

Re:Media will last longer than you think

[DarkOx]

Why store the data in only one format? Why not put one copy on USB Flash, one copy on DVD-R and possibly one copy on some other flash with a different interface like SD?

Unless its allot of data this should be fairly cheap and odds are good that at least one of the three mediums will survive and you will have tools to read it easily. Watch your file formats too, i'd stick with lowest common denominator very standard stuff like jpg images, mpeg2video (main mode) with either ac3 or mp2 audio for videos, and mp3 for just audio.