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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."
Just load all of your photos, videos, data, etc onto a retina macbook pro and toss it in the case.
Maybe by 2037 someone will have figured out how to change the battery.
If so, you've got your data and you're good to go.
No worries man, end of epoch isn't until 2038.
Be careful about your hermetic seals, water leakage has turned many time capsules into a soggy brown liquid. I suggest some silica gel (the kind you shouldn't eat) to absorb any latent water in the air when you seal it so you don't get condesation. Anything you seal inside should either be readable by normal human means or include the reader. Avoid batteries or other volatile chemicals as they will leak. Burned CDs are really just like polaroid photographs and fade in about 15 years on the outset depending on the burn speed and qualities of the dyes. Include black and white photos or 3 color separations so that it is easy to put back together. Same goes for 3d photos, the future is likely to use more stereo photography so take a picture with 2 cameras next to each other of the same type. I use two iphones and tap the shutters simultanously a few times to see if I can get a match. Make sure you deposit the item in a place unlikely to face future development or it will just be shoveled up onto a trash pile. There's a start, but think long term. A lot can happen in a quarter century. LONGNOW DOT ORG
What should you put in a time capsule? Anything non-perishable that might mean something to you. Consider people recovering their time-capsules from 25 years ago. There might be a 5.25 floppy in there with someone's favorite childhood game. It may be difficult to play the game but the floppy disk's texture, smell, and label will bring back the memories. If you're going to store media you may find that in 25 years the data on it may be a pain in the ass to retrieve but the object itself will mean something. I also suggest media that you've used a lot. For example if you've been using a particular usb drive for the last year and it's time to upgrade put the old one in the capsule. 25 years from now the memories of using it are likely to bring you back more than the data that's on it.
What about an oil barrel? :D
You'll need it in 2037!
Plus, you could sell it for a few thousand dollars and buy vintage stuff from 2012
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
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?"
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Make it a science project.
Put identical data on one of every type of storage technology and see which survives. In 25 years you will have a very interesting case study while being nostalgic about the data storage media used back when you were young.
If they all fail then laugh at how silly you were all those years ago and how you should have done x instead.
It is not a format. CD's (and DVD's) you buy in the store are not made the same way as CD's you burn at home. Professionally made CD's have the disk image physically pressed into the media, whereas with home burning a laser is discoloring a dye to produce the same effect. Unfortunately, the dye will eventually fade and the disk will become unreadable. So, CD's are not the same as CD-R or CD-RW and the same holds true for DVD's.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What should you put in a time capsule? Anything non-perishable that might mean something to you. Consider people recovering their time-capsules from 25 years ago. There might be a 5.25 floppy in there with someone's favorite childhood game. It may be difficult to play the game but the floppy disk's texture, smell, and label will bring back the memories. If you're going to store media you may find that in 25 years the data on it may be a pain in the ass to retrieve but the object itself will mean something. I also suggest media that you've used a lot. For example if you've been using a particular usb drive for the last year and it's time to upgrade put the old one in the capsule. 25 years from now the memories of using it are likely to bring you back more than the data that's on it.
I have picked up 25+ year old computer systems that work fine. Floppies that are that old, still retaining the info and working. And we are talking like sitting in an attic or garage or basement for many years. Not only do I and many others have systems that can read the info from 25+ years ago, i'm sure if you put stuff on CD/DVD's and maybe a thumbdrive, peeps will be able to get to it to check out.
Be seeing you...
Pressed music CD's DVDs are not the same as the ones you use to burn. Pressed CDs/DVDs are not made of the same materials as those used for burning, and will last decades if properly taken care of.
For CDs/DVDs used for burning, the first couple generations of these (when you were paying 2-5$ A DISC) were made of much thicker material and most of the stuff I burnt in the 90s on these types of discs are still readable today. However, with cheap discs came cheap/slim material, which are greatly affected by disc rot. I have some CDs and DVDs that I burnt just 2-3 years ago that are unreadable due to disc rot. If you hold them up to a light you can see the holes.
That being said, you can buy archival DVDs & CDs. The companies claim they will last 100 years if stored properly. I use them to back up my pictures. Those should be sufficient for the time capsule. Burn 3 or more copies to ensure greater chances of being to read everything.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
USB is pretty much everywhere these days, in your phone, your game console, in your MP3 player, in your harddrive, in your TV, maybe even in your toaster. In Europe there it's even part of law, as they want to get rid of all the custom phone chargers. For mouse and keyboards you don't need anything faster then USB1.0, so there is no need to upgrade, so I would expect that to be around for a pretty damn long time, especially given that right now there is nothing on a the horizon to replace it and even if, whatever will replace it will very likely be either compatible or can be made compatible with a cheap adapter, just like you can still get a serial port and an IDE apdopter for your computer today.
The whole obsolete hardware craze is really a little overrated, as when it happened in the past, it was always with pretty damn obscure hardware. Of course not everybody has a machine around to read some old NASA tapes, so you will have trouble reading those in a few decades, but pretty damn near everybody has something around to read USB.
The elephant in the room that nobody is discussing... what's your container going to be made of? How are you going to seal it and keep it sealed? These are non-trivial questions. Containers react with the materials inside and corrode both inside and out. Seals dry out. Etc... etc...
There's a lot more to this than just the items inside. The container has to maintain its integrity too.
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.
We are talking 25 years here.
You don't need to be particularly worried about printed documents, even photos, over that short period.
Go into any business that has been around for 30 or 40, or dig into some boxes in your attic or your parents attic, dig into the back of the file cabinets or storage boxes, and you will find documents much older than 25 years that are in perfect shape.
Acid free paper is for 100 years plus, and has been the norm for off the shelf office paper since the 60s or earlier. True archival paper is Alkaline paper, which has a life expectancy of over 1,000 years for the best paper and 500 years for average grades.
So for 25 years, no special precautions need be taken when using common commercial printing paper that you might buy at your local office supply store.
Even Newspapers can be saved for 25 years by simply bagging them in plastic, but it might be better to access the newspaper's web site and print the desired articles on you laser printer using standard office paper.
25 years is not that hard to do.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"Acid-free archival paper should be good, even for photos."
I'm a railway man, and where I live all the official complaints books* in the stations date from 1946.
*(where travelers can write their complaints in)
They don't look brand new, especially around the corners, but they're still used 'til this very day.
PS. People complained about the same stuff 60 years ago that they do now.
'The company is criminal, the service terrible....'
I would consider using an airtight sealed case, oxygen absorber and a dessicant...
"Stuff" will last longer in the absence of oxygen. Try to replace the air with an inert gas or nitrogen. This is common in food preservation as well where vacuum sealing alone isn't enough. Sometimes the shape of grains or seeds leaves too much space for air.
What facilitates aging? ... ...
- Oxygen
- Remove oxygen
- Make air tight
- Water
- Remove moisture
- Make water tight
- Light
- Remove light sources ?
- Make light tight
- Excessive heat
- Remove heat sources
- Shield from heat
-
-
- Time
- Put in box and accelerate to near the speed of light
Microsoft Windows prior to 95 and NT4 was complete garbage.
As opposed to what after that? Incomplete garbage?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.