Would a USB drive or SD card survive in a properly sealed time capsule?

Question

I want to bury a time capsule that will be set to open in 50-100 years. This being 2016, I would like for it to contain digital data inside of it. So my question is, would a USB survive? How about a SD card? I am creating it on a low-budget so I'd preferably like to use a storage medium that is already readily available - a USB, SD card, or HDD would be my preferred mediums.

Answer 1

M-DISC is a little-known technology, exhibiting the following properties:

• It supports both the DVD and Blu-ray formats.
• An ordinary Blu-Ray or DVD reader can read it with no customizations.
• All M-DISC media is write-once, like DVD-R or BluRay-R. No re-writable M-DISC has yet been put to market.
• M-DISC is offered both "as a service", where a company sends you M-DISCs with your data, and as something a consumer can buy: you need a special M-DISC burner that's not all that different from a standard optical device (and they're not all that expensive), and then you need blank M-DISCs.
• The per-unit cost of M-DISC media is quite a lot higher than BluRay or DVD discs, even the rewritable ones. The cost of DVD M-DISCs is about on par with regular (non-M-DISC) BluRay media, and the cost of BDXL M-DISCs is about $20 USD per disc. So, on a per-disc basis, it ranges from about 80 cents to a dollar for smaller media, to $20 for the highest volume available (100 GB per BDXL M-DISC).
• M-DISCs are purported to last for 1000 years. The manufacturer designed them specifically with longevity in mind. Of course, no one has actually tried to play a 1,000 year old M-DISC because M-DISC has only existed since 2009, but the longer this technology exists, the more proven it will become as people take progressively older M-DISCs out of storage, test them, and find that they work.
• I'm avoiding getting into a lot of detail here, but the main difference between M-DISC and regular optical discs is that M-DISC uses inorganic compounds to store the bits on the optical media, while "regular" discs use organic compounds (dyes) to store the bits. Those organic dyes break down and eventually flake off after many years, but inorganic compounds in an inert environment (a "cool, dry place") shouldn't experience any such decay.

It's up to you whether you want to believe that M-DISC is truly as durable as they say it is, but it's backed by some big names like LG, ASUS, and the US Department of Defense, according to the Wikipedia article linked above.

Longevity tests are hard to do without actually passing the time desired. You can simulate it to some degree with a higher temperature taking the place of a lower temperature over a long period of time, but that often doesn't have the same effect. Therefore any claims of some media lasting an extremely long time, without that media actually having been tested for that period of time, should be considered suspect until there is very compelling physics/scientific evidence that it's truly built to last.

As with all things, your mileage may vary.

Answer 2

Unfortunately this is a difficult question to solve - USB and SD cards are unlikely to be up to the challenge.

You may be better off burning (multiple) CD's or DVD's on archival grade media (Google "Archival Grade CD" and "Archival Grade DVD"). Verbatims Ultralife Goald Archival Grade DVD's claim a lifespan of up to 100 years.

You will need to be mindful of the possible difficulties finding a CD or DVD drive in 50-100 years time, so it may be worth archiving a few of those as well. It may also be worthwhile burning the stuff in different formats - eg if you burn a copy of images as a video, in that format, it may be easier to read in the future as it uses a more generic standard.

Answer 3

You probably need some kind of activate maintenance. Here is my suggestion Get a Rasperberry Pi 3 Plug an SD card an 2 USB of different brands

Additional benefit, they have the means to read it, in the time capsule.

Now you can use the 2 USB to store the same PAR2 data say a setting of 10%. Maybe even parity data on the parity data.

You write a start up script which first checks for badblocks on all devices. Then does a parity check/fix.

If errors above threshold X then decrease the interval betweeen scan times else increase it store next startup time elsewhere, maybe the Rasp Pi RTC can help?

check for available wi-fi bluetooth send email report to yourself.

shutdown -h now

wait for next threshold.

Then your biggest problem becomes battery. If you can somehow hook up a solar panel and do your best to ensure it stays in the sunlight,then awesome.

As long as you can keep it 99% off through use of RTC or similar power consumption is relatively low.

External leads to top it off periodically? Solar

Sadly, without someway to top it of off, or a series of redundant batteries I don't see it lasting that long.

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This is probably more than you want to spend, but here it is anyway.

http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/products http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/nanoform/nanoform-s-characteristics

One form of sapphire recording is claimed to last 100,000,000 years. No power, and no data loss. Read it with a simple microscope. This version may not last 100 million years, but a 100 yr easy.

Answer 4

There's a number of factors that could affect how long data survives. For example, a lot of older GB game cartridges no longer hold save games as their saves were battery-powered. While modern flash storage does not have this issue, it still does lose data eventually.

There is not real difference between SD cards and USB storage- they both use flash storage though specific types of flash storage can vary. However, what ruins flash storage is reading and writing and not time, usually. An HDD would not be ideal, as magnetic storage is decidedly temporary. It would be close at best.

Between USB and SD cards, I would go with the SD card. Unlike USB which is slowly getting replaced by USB-C, SD cards are notably stubborn in adaptation and the only potential replacement right now is MMC (which is conveniently compatible with SD cards!)

In conclusion, the best bet is both a USB drive and an SD card. They both will hold your data equally well, and both are likely to be obsolete by the time you open the capsule.

Good luck finding a computer that can read either of them in 50-100 years.