No Stupid Questions

Any thoughts on tape? Lto tape is designed for 10+ years

Storage media won't survive that long. Hard drive, when used, last about 5 years, give or take. Unused, I have no idea how long the data will stay consistent but I would not count on anything beyond 10 years

so, I would suggest talking with an archivist. Many libraries will have archivists on the payroll (Or know one, anyways) and they'd likely be happy to talk about archival methods.

personally, what I would do- and I make no guarantees that it will work for a decade- is to seal the hard drive (or whatever media,) inside a vacuum bag with a shitload of silica desiccant gel. maybe double bag it with even more silica gel, then place it inside a pelican case. if you double bag, splurge on the indicator stuff and let it sit for a week.

but I'm not an archivist, and they may laugh at my suggestion.

Interesting thread.Would be interested to learn from commenters which storage media is most impervious to digital rot.

Don't bury it. And don't count on ten years. Thirty years guarantees the media won't be physically compatible with future devices. How would you read a floppy disk from 1995 today? You'd be able to find a USB floppy drive, probably, online. Good luck having the disk be in a format that a modern OS understands. You'd need specialty software for that.

Get two spinning disk drives from major brands like Western Digital or Toshiba (not Seagate, for sure). Get different brands to reduce risk of failure from a manufacturing issue (as in, two from the same batch are likely to have the same failure if there was a production issue).

Send one somewhere abroad where it can be stored in a safe deposit box (hopefully, you know someone who lives in a free-er country). Plan to exchange it with a freshly written drive every three years. Go back and forth like this, completely rewriting the data each time to minimize the chances of bit-rot (look up this term to understand why you're rewriting and exchanging the drives).

This will also address files formats that evolve and eventually become incompatible with future software (thinking proprietary things, not plain text, jpegs, or standardized media files). I did something similar having a family member store music that I recorded (my own, not ripped CDs) in a different state in case of natural disaster at home.

All of this can be done pretty cheap. $200 bucks should cover both drives and at least a couple of years of physical storage at a bank. International shipping will probably be the biggest cost, especially over time.

Probably want to encode it on a WORM tape. (Suggestion used LTO drives on eBay)

Then store it in the centre of a sealed medium ~~iron~~ galvanized metal box filled with silica. (Take care not to damage the tape, without trapping moisture.)

I'd imagine it would work well if you can keep the hardware to use it functional.

Drop a thumb stick (mechanical failure) into a plastic zip-lock in a vacuum (oxygen) then into a metal thermos mug with water (pressure and radiation) then dig it really deep (accidential discovery and weather). By the time it deteriorates you'd have problems finding USB interfaces to plug it in. The location itself is largely irrelevant, but I'd recommend some place far from human-occupied places.

The authoritarian state problem isn't solveable, but you can defend it by obscurity, like not leaving a trace of thinking about this info cache, or leaving too many of these caches to reliably dig up all of them.

Does it need to be physical? I'd expect data on a well funded S3 account or a tar snap account to live 30 years

You can not.

There is not a safe and reliable way to store digital information for such big time span while off.

The maximum you could get is some programmable eeprom and usually no vendor will bet that the information is accesible after 15 years while power off.

But once this is said, there a re few things you con do to maximize your chances.

From the technology point of view everything that is using old nand-flash technology should give you decent chances after 15 years power off. To ensure better probabilities use a fs with possibilities of storing recovery /parity/ checksum data. And try to store in a environment with minimum changes in temp, humidity and radiation (electromagnetic, solar).

And cross some fingers