My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.
OK, punch tape it is then.
It’s baffling, you can do a lot of tasks with a compact version of PDP-11 (there were two Soviet clones, I don’t remember which of them is which - one was a proper one, and could be used as a terminal server too, another had the monitor board simplified, IIRC, making it more of a normal PC of that time, just with PDP-11 CSA and the OS was RTX-11 in essence, but reverse-engineered and localized and with hardware drivers for those machines).
(I know it’s a different period and they had floppies.)
Why do we need such enormously complex fragile things? We rely on them so much that if, say, a “global thermonuclear war” really happens, with following hunger, movements of population, rapid climate changes, - our civilization is profoundly fucked.
Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.
Paper doesn’t last, is hard to store, and the information density is miserable.