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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."
Acid-free archival paper should be good, even for photos. Look at what the manufacturer says - they mean serious business when they make these papers, real art will be put up in museums reproduced on them.
As far as data goes, the fastest way is to yenc encode (like MIME/base64) it and print it out on said archival paper. It is possible you can get it transferred to microfilm but that's hard to OCR even nowadays. In 25 years, the yenc algorithms will still be around, and you can OCR and decode the data from the paper; if it consists of an executable it will probably not be a problem to run since we have x86 emulators as we are now, but you never know. libjpeg will still be around, libz, libpng, etc; if all else fails, describe the algorithm and data structure and print THAT out, it is much smaller than an executable. Then you can re-code the lost libz and decompress your data.
If more data is that important to you, you have a few routes:
You can make cassette tapes full of data like old computers used to do. Don't laugh. Just put a player in the "time capsule" too.
You can store multiple redundant archival DVDs including QuickPAR files *along with a DVD drive using USB 3.0*. It may die due to permanent magnet weakening but other than that it'll almost definitely survive. It's true that they degrade with time but that is also usually with usage. It is likely that, if you can read them, they will retain enough information, along with the surviving QuickPAR chunks, to reconstitute one. Even better, since there is a push to archive things on DVD discs, it is possible that in 2037 there may be drives in some public center for people to come in and read their old archived discs.
A small faraday cage will do miracles with other magnetic materials.
But if you're going to all the trouble, why not just keep all this stuff with you for the next 25 years? :-D