>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.
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.
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.
Our best answer might be film. Some of it has already survived 80 years. (Micro)film is supposed to last something like 500 years, and it's what Github picked for their Arctic Code Vault. I was curious one time so I looked into it, but it seems like most effort is on converting microfilm to digital, not the other way around.
Anecdotally, the stuff my grandpa filmed on Super-8 is still in nearly perfect condition 65 years later. But most of his 16mm stuff from just a few years earlier than that has vinegar syndrome, so it's not "just film it and you're good"
Vinegar Syndrome is on film base/stocks that are cellulose acetate, they break down into acetic acid. Films after that period are estar base which is polyethylene terephthalate and very stable for archival. In fact if it jams a film projector it more likely wrecks the projector than breaks, which is kinda bad.
Back in 2015, Wired did an article about the Nuclear Bunker that holds some of Hollywood's oldest films and TV Shows:
If the film is rare, highly flammable, and was made before 1951, there's a good chance it'll end up on George Willeman's desk. Or more specifically, in one of his vaults. As the Nitrate Film Vault Manager at The Library of Congress' Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, Willeman presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible cinematic treasure, from the original camera negatives of 1903's The Great Train Robbery to the early holdings of big studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and Universal. And more barrels keep showing up every week.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/
Archive link: https://archive.ph/zluV8
> We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum.
We have that. We know how to put digital data onto paper, at high density. Not high compared to actual drives or even optic disks of course, but still enough that we could put all importan data that a person produces throughout a lifetime into a large box of A4 sheets, which would still be legible after many decades. All that's needed is an agreement on a clever collection of formats for text and images, maybe even video, formats that are well documented (ideally the documentation is stored alongside the data).
The problem is not that we don't have the tech to do such things, the problem is
a) In our current world, the only things that seem to get huge amounts of resources are those that make some shareholders happy
b) Most of the data humanity produces these days, is useless noise, and the only reason anyone collects it, is to make a quick buck. And generative AI has made this trend a lot worse.
I've had an idea for wide format, high density, optically read, punched mylar (or other similar plastic) film - so something like a 5 foot roll of mylar punched at 12-16 dpi. Leading to storage in the 1-2k bytes per linear inch.
Mylar if stored properly could last a very very long time.
Archival LTO has a life of 30 years (under proper storage) - likely longer but they "warranty" for 30 years.
The issue is that anything you made like that would need to be forward readable because storage capacity demands only ever increase over time.
i.e. imagine a 1.44MB 80 year floppy disk from 1985, while it'd last til 2065 no one would use it in 2025 because you'd need about a thousand of them to hold a modern 4K video