Like most, my personal requirements for long-term data storage pretty much end when I end. So, we're talking decades, and certainly not centuries or millennia. I'd even say that the vast majority of things I store on my own hard-drives and various cloud servers don't need to persist in the digital world past a month. There's probably something instructive in that, but whatever: We'd just forget about it anyway.

I'm not exactly the target market for "5D" memory, a technology that's been in the works for several years at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton which promises all but eternal data backup. The storage scheme is based on tiny quartz discs, each one offering some 360 terabytes of data, along with resistances to heat up to 1000 degrees Celsius and data retention on the order of several billion years. Which is a very long time.

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