[jespersaron]

Surviving artifacts are not a very good and coherent source of information for future archeologists, alien or human. After all, we are still kind of unsure about construction methods of Egyptian pyramids, which are less than 5000 years old.

And past civilizations at least seemed to have cared much more about longevity of their creations than we do, we can not even store our digital photos reliably over a decade without active replication. Without projects like this, future researchers will have to put the whole picture together using only plastic bottles and broken vinyl records :)

[therealidiot]

I've started using M-DISC Blu-rays for my backups, which are supposed to last for quite a long time. I don't know how long they will actually last in real-world conditions, but I'm hoping its long enough that if I ever need them, they'll still work.

As for preserving things for future generations, I don't know of any good storage techniques. The problem with M-DISCs and other mad-high-density digital storage is that the readers will (most likely) be completely unavailable long before the all of the discs have degraded.

Perhaps we should engrave our data in 2D barcodes, alongside some readable instructions describing how the data can be decoded... Wouldn't have anywhere near the density of optical, magnetic or flash storage though. The whole situation does "worry" me a little, I agree entirely about future researchers not having much to go on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC