Optical storage – the future of long term data preservation (2015) [pdf]

Re:Optical storage – the future of long term data preservati... by joe_the_user on Sunday November 14, 2021 @07:55PM (#29222331)

If your media lasts a million years but all the machines that can read it vanish in twenty, where's the win? I assume the evolved rats or bunny rabbits that follow us may reverse engineer it at some point in their evolution and then just shake their fuzzy heads.

Edit: Note, in the early nineties, a lot of library got sold proprietary optical drives as archiving solutions and when those became pink elephants, they wrote learned papers about "you can never what medium will last"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Optical storage – the future of long term data preservati... by wmf on Sunday November 14, 2021 @09:56PM (#29223122)

There have been various ideas about putting decoding instruction in human-readable format at the beginning of the media so that people in the future could use a simple magnifying glass to read the info that would allow them to build a device to read the rest of the data. Nobody cares enough to actually use that stuff though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Optical storage – the future of long term data preservati... by BuildTheRobots on Monday November 15, 2021 @10:35AM (#29228588)

"5G Optical Storage" is designed with this in mind. The first layer can be read with an optical microscope and polariser which contains instructions for building something to read the second layer.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Optical storage – the future of long term data preservati... by VectorLock on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:57PM (#29234669)

You can always make new drives or new ways to read media.

[ Parent | on HN ]