This is just baffling.
We haven`t come up with a way to preserve digital files for ever?
Ummm…hello? Is anyone home?
Why is this baffling? It’s market forces. The market wants cheap high-volume storage media, and a number have been developed to fill the niche. Writable CDs are less than $0.001/meg, so I can burn a lot of data without worrying about cost. Most of my clients won’t last 20 years, so saving their data that long is a minor concern.
You could certainly design something better and longer-lasting than a CD, something that wouldn’t be influenced by magnetic fields, wouldn’t delaminate, wouldn’t degrade quickly in typical storage conditions, etc. However, it would cost more to build and the media would be much more expensive, which makes the market smaller and makes it a questionable business proposition. Even with a media that lasts forever, you still have to worry about the format of your data. Even if the binary data is readable in 10,000 years, it has to mean something, so you have to make sure you provide the specs as well on some sort of Rosetta stone so your great-great-grandkids can map your data to their file formats. Oh, and remember not to record your file format specs in an ASCII text file because they won’t know what that is. Better write it down for them and hope the English language survives.
If you think this is short-sighted, you’re in good company:
http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/library.htm
How about punch cards? As long as you have a working punch card reader, you could seal the cards up in an air-tight storage unit. Heck, vacuum-seal them if you want to.
Nahtanoj
We are, in the librarian profession, in a preservation crisis. Acid-free paper will last practically forever if well-cared for. Archival quality silver halide microfilm will last centuries, and if you gotta you can read it with a magnifying glass and the sun. Of course, everybody hates microfilm; this is a drawback.
Acid paper only lasts about half a century. The human experience since about 1850 or so is crumbling into dust. Mass deacidification is not the solution we thought it was, and nothing better has come up.
CDs, under optimal conditions… maybe 50 years. Magnetic tape, also optimally, we’ve gotten to last about 20. And that’s ignoring the problems we have being able to read data. Look around for the household-level data from the 1960 census, if you like.
Film deteriorates as well; not just the nitrate stock, which dissolves into explosive goo, but safety film as well (non-explosive goo). There is no copy of Super Bowl I. This is not just an early-film issue. In fact, all of these preservation issues are still going on - look at the books on your shelf you’ve bought recently. 9 out of 10 are probably on acidic paper. And we know better now!
Anyway, the answer to your question - acid-free paper or silver-halide microfilm. Stone’s kinda, you know, heavy.
I belive the 2 Voyager probes had a record attached to the sides which had digital data encoded as an analog lp record, in the form of gold pated master disks.
As the main erosion, due to micrometeoroids, has long past and records should be playable for millions of years to come, especially as they enclosed a stylus/pickup on the probe.
The oldest European art I think is from the beautiful Chauvet cave with an, admittably disputed, carbon date of around 30,00 years ago.
There is earlier work, as from Australia, but it’s just crude finger marks.
I’d been thinking of this my self,and I belive the answer would be the Voyager solution of digital data stored as an analog lp record (with stylus).
Chauvet cave date should be 30,000 years ago
Well, Saving them as a digital file is going to be utterly useless unless you also save the equipment needed to access it.
Say you did this in the past, you wouldn’t happen to still have your tape drive or 5 1/4 floppy drive would you?
You probably couldn’t just save the drives either, as computer tech will have advanced and probably have caused the ports you were used to hooking up your drive to be rendered obsolete and no longer found on computers, and even if they are, drivers may no longer exist.
Which means you would have to save the computer too. And watch out, as the data on the computer’s HD will degrade over time too, possibly rendering the computer unbootable. Hopefully the OS it used was saved for posterity for someone if the media it was originally on degraded too.
(seeing the problem here)
Best bet, if they are pictures, save them as print outs, or on microfilm, as previously suggested. If you try to save them on a digital format, you may find that years down the road, even if the media survived, the means of reading the media may very well not have.
More informormation about the Voyager records at www.cedmagic.com/featured/voyage/voyager-record.html
and www.jpl.nasa.gov/flash/voyager_record/index_voyager.html
Oh dear, let’s try again (damn literal computers)
www.cedmagic.com/featured/voyager/voyager-record.html
and www.jpl.nasa.flash/voyager_record/index_voyager.htm
I know! I’ll make oil paintings of my spreadsheets - those Old Masters paintings last darn near forever. 
Sure, we could carve binary data into granite, but a row of holes and non-holes in the rock is meaningless without a translation. For example - is the data ASCII, EBCDIC, or Unicode? Something else? Where does it begin? Is it raw or somehow packetized? If so, what are the framing characters? What’s the bit (pit?) rate? In other words, is
___________* really 001000010010000100001
or is it 0100101001001 done sloppy?
Um, the polyester base for film and microfilm are the same, and the deterioration rate is no different than nitrate or acetate film when kept under optimal storage conditions (low temp, low RH). The silver-halide emulstion used in preservation-grade microfilm is the same used in YCM separations in film preservation. Microfilm degrades just as badly as other types of film when not properly stored (which is actually quite common).
Precisely this happened to me last weekend. They wanted to sell off some old computer equipment at work. I scored an old non-working PC with a 5.25-inch floppy drive. I went to remove the floppy drive and install it in my current PC.
Problem 1: the drive’s mounting holes weren’t at the right level for my drive bays. I had to either mount the drive in between two bays, or mount it upside down.
Problem two: the drive used an older connector that was not present on my computer’s drive cable. No problem; I took the cable from the old computer as well.
I connected everything and turned the computer on.
Problem three arose: no drive activity. I checked the BIOS. There was the cause: the BIOS did not have a setting for any 5.25-inch drive other than the 1.22 MB ones.
It was a no go. And that’s with two computers of the same hardware family only eight years apart!
Self-replicating DNA seems to have been working for a couple billion years.
Yep - just look at humans, the perfect copies of those simple multicellular organisms from a few aeons ago.
Why yes, I do have a Darwin fish on my car.
Well, yeah, but humans are far more similar to those primordial organisms (primorganisms?) than we are to, for example, rocks. Not a perfect analogy, granted.
[sub]Yeah? Well MY Darwin fish grew wings and flew away.[/sub]
I just hope someone’s printing off all these SDMB threads!
I would point out that not only is there no copy of Super Bowl I’s broadcast, there isn’t one of Super Bowl II either. However, I don’t believe this was a case of the tape disintegrating. It was more a case that nobody that it was important to hold on to copies of them at the time.
And Super Bowl I was covered by 2 networks!
I’m also in the library biz (or the industry as we like to call it) and I can tell you that people despise microfilm. However, it is sturdy. It’s biggest enemy is not chemical degradation, but rather idiotic human beings who don’t like to ask anyone for help in using the readers and send the film to its doom with poor handling.
Whatever medium you choose, keep it FAR away from me. I seem to project an energy field which crashes systems, destroys hard drives, erases data and ruins electronics.
I’m learning to cope with it but given my high tech fetish, its getting damnnably expensive to be me. Maybe I should try one of those copper bracelets 
Good luck with your data and if you see me coming wrap your system in tin-foil immediately.