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Comment by lifthrasiir

13 days ago

I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful (<10 KB/page), while dot-based or color-based approaches are heavily limited by printing techniques (<500 KB/page). It is hard to preserve paper, unless you are willing to sacrifice its information density even more.

For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this case would likely be microfilms, which should be at least 100x dense than the ideal paper data storage. Higher density allows for using less dense encodings to aid readers. And as far as I know microfilms are no harder to preserve than papers.

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lifthrasiir

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pastage  13 days ago

It is degrading too fast, microfilm archives need to be digitilized now, the solvent and image chemicals and media are all part of the problem with microfilms. Archival paper is a nice medium that can be stored a long time. This is of course a question of how long you want to store your information if you want to do 00500 years it is probably good.

Or just go with metal https://rosettaproject.org/

Or try to create a culture for humans and store information in that.

  • xyzzy123  13 days ago

    Metal engraving fairly accessible these days.

    Fiber laser in 100W range would do it, maybe $10k?

    You could do photochemical etching but would be more fuss and wouldn't last as long as a laser engraving.

    Probably looking at order of 1gig/1000kg if using 1mm 316 plate (napkin math only, naive estimate). Interesting to explore.

    • WorldPeas  11 days ago

      I would wonder if glass/plastic would be viable given the availability of dvd/modisc burning lasers (though the format is kneecapped by its issues with glue). Is there any good literature about “burning” nonuniform durable materials in a rotary disc burner or am I off base here wrt the capabilities of these smaller lasers

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IAmBroom  12 days ago

> It is hard to preserve paper, unless you are willing to sacrifice its information density even more.

We have paper books from 500 years ago. Microfiche is already deteriorating.

If you keep paper dry and flat, and use pH-neutral inks and paper, it is extremely stable.

  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF  12 days ago

    Dry and flat... Laminated? Or will the plastic degrade quicker than the paper?

    • mystified5016  12 days ago

      Likely the adhesive in the laminate would degrade the paper over long periods. Lamination also causes additional physical stress on the contained page when handled.

      I'd also expect the plastics to go yellow and opaque over long periods, and recovering the document without damage may be difficult or impossible