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Comment by wrigglingworm | Hacker News Reader

That's really cool, but wouldn't it be worthwhile to also include in the vault a device which can read all that data? Or perhaps engrave on the interior of the vault the instructions for making such a device?

Even in the past few decades storage mediums have changed pretty rapidly and what was the standard back then may be totally unusable for a layperson today. I can't imagine what changes can occur over 1000 years.

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A device wouldn’t last that long, but would provide a template to follow that, with detailed instructions and information about the formats and recording process, could be used to read the media.

I'm pretty sure we don't have any digital storage media that last 1000 years, or even 100 years. There's no point even trying to read it that far in the future; it's completely gone.

I think you missed the point. They put it on tape and claim it will last 1000 years. Will the knowledge, ability, and devices capable of reading tape last 1000 years?

> I think you missed the point. They put it on tape and claim it will last 1000 years.

I didn't miss that point, because they never made that claim. At least in the linked video. If they had, it'd be bullshit.

https://github.blog/2022-09-20-if-you-dont-make-it-beautiful...

"This vault contains the 188 reels of hardened archival film which will preserve the 02/02/2020 snapshot of every active public GitHub repository for 1,000 years."

Well that goes against multiple different sources claiming that such long-term digital storage doesn't exist. Plenty of threads on data hoarding talk about the problem of keeping data fresh even a few decades. It's pretty hard to believe any film could last 1000 years, but I'm no expert and I'd love to be wrong on this one. Thanks for the link.

Bluray has an archive format that holds 100GB per disk and is rated to last 100 years in regular climate controlled storage. Should last longer in a cold environment like the vault.

One could also etch the data on a silicon wafer that could be read with a microscope (maybe indexes and retrieval instructions readable with an optical microscope, data with an electron microscope).

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