The year is 2245. The heirs finally locate a working, antique reader that can handle the ancient USB key, hoping to find great-great-grandpa's crypto-wallet or the pin-code to a long-lost Maltese bank account.
Instead, they find a 4-bit, VGA-quality scan of Miss October.
An actual book stores more data than that and for longer. At that point, why not just etch the data onto a metal plate or something? 8K is only a few pages of text at 12pt. It could easily fit onto two sides of a small-ish metal plate, etched in 8pt or so, and it would last, potentially, for millennia.
What’s the practical benefit of that? If the point is long-term storage, rewriting isn’t a priority (or possibly even a need). And this isn’t designed for capacity.
And the firmware inside that rp2040 is stored on plain old flash memory. So while the data may still be on the memory chip, the controller chip dies at just the same pace than every other usb drive - and then you can't access it.
just print something like a QR code in absurd resolution and read it in a document scanner, a single sheet of A4 should be able to fit quite a lot of data.
I would be surprised if you couldn't get 8KB for 200 years out of standard flash simply by extreme duplication --- 8GB/8KB means a million copies on one (very small by today's standards!) drive.
Or is the failure mechanism something other than bitrot?
Kinda funny, I was just writing about archival media this morning. Verbatim makes DVDs & Blue Rays that last ~100 years, and M-DISC makes ones that'll last ~1000 years. And the Verbatim Blu Rays run ~$0.036 per gig.
Oh yeah, stick it in the sun or a damp box and either will probably be bad in weeks instead of decades or centuries. But supposedly they'll meet those lifespans good at room temp
Researchers have developed a new quartz coin that can store 360TB of data for 14 billion years. This is a significant improvement from the previous quartz glass storage, which could only store data for 300 million years. The technique uses femtosecond laser pulses to write data in the 3D structure of quartz at the nanoscale. This makes it possible to store the whole of human history in a small coin-sized device. The storage system is also very durable, able to withstand high temperatures. This technology could potentially serve as a means of archiving important information for future generations or even extraterrestrial beings.
Mold is actually the biggest concern with the most popular archival format LTO. EMPs aren't that much of a concern. Bit flips and bit rot are your main concerns traditionally when using flash for archival storage. It's recommended if you go the flash route to keep your array hot (ie powered on) and use a file system with data scrubbing capabilities such as ZFS.