[weaverheavy]

>We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum.

Minidisc. I have discs that are 30+ years old that have been abused their entire life and still work fine with no noticeable degradation. I specifically choose this format to archive audio because the disc housing works great for environmental protection and I’d eventually like to give my music collection to my children/grand children. The discs can also store data. My minidisc player shows up as removable storage device when I plug it into my computer so I can throw anywhere from about 140mb-1Gb(hi-MD) per disk.

Officially they’re rated to about 50 years, but if you sealed them and stored them properly then they could easily make it past 80 years.

[myself248]

The trouble is that the players likely won't last as long as the media. And nobody's making new players. Microfilm has the advantage that cameras continue to be relevant and fundamentally the reader is just a camera.

[weaverheavy]

I have working players that are older than I am. They’re mechanically very simple, just lube the gears up occasionally and keep them clean. They use the same laser that a cd player does, and the service manuals for most devices are available for free online and they have part numbers for all of the ICs, and wiring diagrams and schematics for the all of the components.

An enterprising individual could probably clone an old device and flash a stock firmware to it if they really wanted to. The functionality that goes first in older devices is usually the write head, but you’d probably still be able to read discs for decades if you took care of the device and stored it well.

The minidisc community online is also very active and people are active working to reverse engineer virtually every aspect of the players and disc writing software, and some people even produce new drop-in replacement parts for the components that tend to fail like OLED displays, etc.