Apparently, in some countries, they are founded, usually somewhere underground, in specially created bunkers capable of surviving climatic disasters and other banks of large collections of information on the achievements of human civilization gathered on digital data carriers.
These are properly secured Big Data database systems, data warehouses, underground information banks, digitally recorded.
The underground bunkers themselves can survive various climatic and other calamities for perhaps hundreds or thousands of years.
But how long will the large collections of information survive in these Big Data systems and data warehouses stored on digital media?
Perhaps a better solution would be to write this data analogically on specially created discs?
Already in the 1970s, a certain amount of data concerning the achievements of human civilization was placed on the Pioneer 10 probe sent to space that recently left the solar system and will be nearest 10,000 year flying with the information about human civilization to the Alpha Centauri constellation.
At that time, the amount of data sent to the Universe regarding the achievements of human civilization was recorded on gold discs.
Is there a better form of data storage at the moment when this data should last thousands of years?
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Theoretically thousands years unless unexpected disasters occur...
The old Egyptians found a method to manage this and there are more technologies from Mesopotamia and cave drawings of course.
"But how long will the large collections of information survive in these Big Data systems and data warehouses stored on digital media?" If this is the focus of your set of questions, my first answer had been addressing a different issue, which is also of some importance in this context. But there are a lot of technologies in daily use in data centres all over the world keeping all data safe. There is a lingering misunderstanding how data is kept in data centres. It's not the case that "new" data is written to a certain type of storage and will remain there forever. Basic storage technologies develop with a new generation every 10 up to 20 years. Storage hardware needs to be replaced every 5 up to 10 years, not only because it wears off, but just because the manufacturer doesn't support longer periods of service.
Consequently data centre managers keep track with this and replace old hardware by new technology and all the data is moved to its new storage location.
To be prepared for various kinds of disasters, important data is backed up (to tape for instance), synchronously or/and asynchronously copied to a "mirror device", secured by "continuous data protection (CDP)" or just sheltered by basic instruments using redundancy in combination with simple algorithms like with RAID.
These concepts are not bound to any actual storage hardware and can be taken over within the steady process of hardware renewal and data migration. One could name this Information Life Cycle Management (ILM).
Theoretically thousands years unless unexpected disasters occur...
Yes ...really nice comment Mr. Frank Schmitz ....(one should expect the unexpected)....
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