Ask Slashdot: Storing Items In a Sealed Chest For 25 Years? 434
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."
Re:Put stuff in sealed plastic cases? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Nitrogen (Score:2, Interesting)
When I was in college, I remember scientist in Japan announcing they had found a way to store data in bacterial DNA - every time the bacteria underwent mitosis, the data was also duplicated so when you want to read it again, you have billions of copies in case some are corrupted/mutated. The expected lifespan before the entire colony had corrupted data was extremely long - thousands or millions of years.
So throw in a petri dish.
Re:Nitrogen (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Put stuff in sealed plastic cases? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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....'