I think the first biggie is non decaying storage. Outside of some paper, everything seems to decay fast, and even if stored correctly. Film goes bad in climate controlled vaults at times.
Those DVDs made of rock supposedly last a long time, but it would be nice to have something that lasts 1000s of years.
If you're talking about analog archival that is a whole other ball of yarn, but in terms of digital then I would think that the thing to do is use only lossless compression, bit-level fidelity error correction, and multiply-redundant, multi-region storage. You must plan on storage media, providers, and entire networks partitioning, disappearing, and failing.
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I find myself thinking about the conundrum of long-term digital archiving pretty often. It's a very interesting question.
I think the first biggie is non decaying storage. Outside of some paper, everything seems to decay fast, and even if stored correctly. Film goes bad in climate controlled vaults at times.
Those DVDs made of rock supposedly last a long time, but it would be nice to have something that lasts 1000s of years.
If you're talking about analog archival that is a whole other ball of yarn, but in terms of digital then I would think that the thing to do is use only lossless compression, bit-level fidelity error correction, and multiply-redundant, multi-region storage. You must plan on storage media, providers, and entire networks partitioning, disappearing, and failing.
You have to actively have an archive, with archivists. The geek stuff is secondary.
Something that can only survive if it has long-term funding is not really a solution to long-term archival.