Cookies and Capacitors

What is the most permanent, practical, storage medium to archive my journal on?

Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 8:05PM

For the past month or so, I’ve been traveling. Through my travels, I’ve collected a plethora of stories and experiences, and I’ve handwritten almost sixty pages in my moleskin journal. My handwriting is complete chicken scratch, and there’s no doubt in my mind that even I won’t be able to decipher it thirty years from now. Therefore, I want to type it up.

So this leads me to my ultimate question: what is the most permanent storage medium to put my entries into? I know burned CDs use dye to store information, and most fade after ~10 years. Magnetic media also fades, although I don’t know specific figures (I have floppy disks from the 80s and data tape from the 70s that still work) of their degradation. I have no idea how long flash media survives. Right now, though, I’m thinking about printing a few copies of my journal onto acid-free paper and archiving them in a typical, un-finished Wisconsin basement.

Out of these media (or can anyone offer anything new?) which one will protect my words the longest?

Soon, I’ll start typing everything up. I’ll store it in a database, and leave it there until I figure out what to do with it.