Been seeing some traffic on various sites regarding storage of survival related media. A few thoughts on the subject for your consideration.

Anything that relies on current or magnetism to maintain the information is subject to failure over twenty years. Anything that relies on a burnt in image (CD), is subject to failure as well as all the known materials they are burned into are subject to flow among other potential failure mechanisms.

Then we need to assess the need for reading whatever your chosen technology is in that distant future. Walk back twenty years, and ask yourself if the media of that time (1994), and thirty years (1984), will read on the hardware you have now. Current systems would likely require some serious work and coding to read a 3.5" or 5.25" floppy drive for instance. We could get really screwy by going back into the 1970's, and 1960's.

It would be a mistake to assume any given technology that you have currently, will read decades from now as the technology for archiving electronically isn't there yet.

Having said that, I have information going back a very long time handed down to me from various family members. A large part of it had to be recreated as the paper was fading and yellowing from acid concerns.

[a href="http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/115-114e.htm"]http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/115-114e.htm[/a]

There are many historical text that survived hundreds of years, but what is generally missed, is that they were written on parchment. Parchment did not start out as paper at all. The original parchment was actually animal skin.

~1400-1500 and with the advent of printing presses, the practice of running plant fibers through sulfuric acid, and other similar treatments created cheap and plentiful 'paper'.

Today, low acid/archival paper is stabilized to roughly a PH of 7. If one is to record something for the proverbial ages, it should be done on archival paper via a laser printer.

Carbon and styrene acrylate copolymer make up the basis for a black and white toner. The short explanation is the toner is melted and fused into the paper. Inks are subject to chemical breakdown over time and therefore should not be used for archiving.

If you really want to get fancy, you may need to perform some metallic etching on the super critical aspects of your information. This involves sheets of copper with a carbon imprint of your information, that is subsequently etched to make a relief image of that information. After appropriate washing, it will be good for as long as the copper plate is safe from physical damage. Copper flashing once you remove the backing works well for this btw.

Now if your just bent on doing it primarily electronically, which I don't advise, be sure to keep triplicates of it separated from each other. Be sure to store the programs necessary to read that information with it as well. Every five years, replace your old hardware with new, transferring that information forward.