Wasn't it Ray Kurzweil made the comparison between earliest recorded data (epigraphy) and the Singularity through in silico artificial sentience?
Whoever is still on the planet will need to evac before the Earth careens into the Red Giant phase of our star, in about 4 billions years.

…

I have a SciAm (?) article somewheres that talks about long-term information storage (if that is the goal), e.g., for the boundary warnings of a nuclear waste dump. (Imagine a far-distant archaeologist exploring the area … without a Geiger-Müller counter).

First the design of the dump is important, with an obvious defence-in-depth approach to the most dangerous area (centrally) blah blah but the interesting bit was making symbols on stone; now limestone will erode (weather and even fungi can (slowly) eat anything, even heavy metals), so there was some messing about with (plastic? that lasts for tens of thousands of years) coating on the stone, or within the lithography, more specifically (a bit like the gold leaf on tombstones, IIRC). I would have thought possibly granite or basalt would be a better choice, but the article went with sedimentary not igneous or metamorphic.

A significant problem is how to interpret ancient marks; Linear A is still lost to modern minds, and it was only three millennia ago. (The Babylonians were using calculus to predict lunar & planetary movements, and that science was lost until the Renaissance.) You would need some sort of primer, a Rosetta stone to aid future retrievers of the data.

That's why you get Heat Death of Universe (HDU) insurance when you buy your backups storage device. When I bought my external hard drive, the store offered a guarantee that the drive would still work even after all that exists is dead and cold, or they'd give me a lifetime supply of free hard drives! And all for just an extra $500!! I had a hard time keeping a straight face while they rang me up; I didn't want them to realize just out how badly I was ripping the suckers off. XD

20 years from now, I doubt I will be caring about those free 2TB hard drives. I still have a few less-than-1-GB usb sticks around - cool useless relics.

― William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003.

Until we get some kind of optical storage crystals like holocrons, mere mortals like ourselves are stuck with external hard drives (or a NAS in RAID if you want to go semi-pro).

Hydro-active data crystal penis devices.

Sorry I couldn't come up with anything cooler-sounding.

How about the Darth Invader?

Would that be usable for everyone? Or is it just for people that don't already have a general purpose penis device?

I'm getting a specific scene from Ghost in the Shell (though which movie or which episode of which series eludes me entirely) where a man is on an airport and reading a book while waiting for a plane, the book entirely consisting of bar codes and him getting increasingly distressed with each one as he isn't able to decode them. Bar code books seem rather common in that universe, but I was reminded of that specific scene.
I have a 256MB MP3 player that's stopped functioning as such, but works very well as a storage device. i still use it frequently. But yeah, 2 TB HDDs aren't too hot even now.

A lot of my music cds from the eighties are unreadable due to the text having eaten through the metal on them :-(

QR code supports error correction. Even if the book is damaged a bit, it still could hold intact data losslessly.

To my understanding though, in that case it was encrypted and he didn't have the key.

I was going to say 7z, but DNA certainly beats it hands down.

The only problem with DNA is that it changes over time. As cells replicate you end up with little alterations. This is why living things age. Even trees age, so it would likely mess up save files after a few years.

I'm leaning towards a crystallized format in text. Anything not human readable may become lost as the computers that were used to read it vanish. Maybe some sort of carbon or silicone based storage media? Like a super advanced plastic.

New millennium stone tablets.

Maybe this kind of material? If you wanted to embed further data into the words themselves, it could be dual use. The words could literally create pictures via a machine or be read to you with the voice of Morgan Freeman.

Precisely. I swear some people think that DNA is immutable. Tell THAT to someone with an acquired auto-immune disease. One little alteration of a gene / group of genes and the damage is done. If we store data in DNA, it'll get damaged or altered just as easily as anything else in this universe. The best you can do for a storage format is something that can take abuse and still maintain its meaning when damaged. The smaller you go, the easier to destroy, so maybe tablets made with an ultra-tough alloy with large writing? lol.