Can you protect your data for 1000 years?

 How can we make sure our collective knowledge stays safe? 
Put it on ice. Yeah! put in ice. Listen, not the way you thought.

Information is valuable and ever since we invented the written word, we have tried to find more permanent ways to preserve it.

Take the Library of Alexandria(one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world) For example it was said to contain hundreds of thousands of books from numerous languages.

It held an inestimable wealth of knowledge and then someone wouldn't burned the darn thing down and we lost it all.

The Internet has served as a repository for information but it's a tricky thing. The internet is constantly evolving, data on the Internet is mutable.

Information stored one day might be changed the next. This is a useful feature of the internet but it's not ideal for storing information in a fixed way.

Enter the Arctic World Archive. It's sort of like a modern-day Library of Alexandria. Its purpose is to store information in a fixed offline format and keep it secure. It's pretty cool literally because it's in the Arctic Circle.

The archive is on the island of Spitsbergen which is in the Svalbard archipelago that's within the borders of Norway. Spitsbergen is home to the Svalbard Seed Vault.

Like the Seed Vault the Arctic world archive occupies a former mine deep under the icy mountains. It is here that the world can safely tuck information away.

The medium that will hold this information is film, yeah film, like the stuff that used to go in cameras. But this is a high-resolution film and it can hold information in one of two ways.

You can encode the information in a machine-readable format meaning it's like the data you'd put on a hard drive or you can store information in the form of text and pictures.

Each length of film will contain instructions on how to retrieve the information printed directly on the film itself. And because this is a fixed format there's no way to change the information once it's on the film.

There's also no way for someone to get remote access to the information without proper authorization. The film isn't connected to any online machines.

So, how do you retrieve information once you need it. You send a request if you have authorization The archive will either set up an online machine and send you a link to the information you've asked for or they will ship the data on physical medium such as optical discs or thumb drives.

The film is supposed to have a shelf life of 1000 years. That's a good long time to store information. It also raises another question how will people of the future read it.

Language changes over time, English has changed dramatically in 1000 years.

Back in 1018, I might say something to you like me “Lika the fetch to LikiTina” that means It's nice to meet you.

But most English speaking people today wouldn't recognize the language.

Preserving information becomes more challenging when you don't know how languages will change as time passes.

It's also tricky to know which forms of media will stand the test of time. Floppy disks, once the king of storage media for personal computers which are now pretty much obsolete for most of us today.

Compact discs stepped aside for DVDs, placing information on film which dates back to the 19th century, seems like a fairly safe bet because you can atleast see that something is stored on the media when you hold it up to the light.

Few countries have already stored information in the Arctic world archive which brings me to a question for you guys

What information would you want to preserved for future generations?

Let me know in the comments below.