The most common medium that we have now would be paper, tapes, CDs, harddrives and memory cards.
You might say that we have progressed well in terms of technology. The memory cards we used now sure beats the floppy disks that I used back in the 1980/90s in terms of speed and capacity. But reality is, these medium of storage dun last very long. Worst, due to the technology advancement, we find it difficult to access old mediums. Try finding a disk drive to read your vintage 5 1/4in floppy disks. In another few more years, you probably will not be able to access your old CDs. Heck, most laptops nowadays do not even come with CD drives anymore. Go further, a decade into the future, I doubt anyone has USB connections.
But access aside, how long can our current means of information storage last? Paper can last several hundred years without significant deterioration under storage conditions in libraries and archives. Digital storage like your CD and HDD could probably last a hundred year at most. Magnetic tapes will last max of 50 years.
Compared to what the Egyptians did. They carved in stone. Those last for a few thousand years. Until now, we could not outdo them.
Someone invented quartz glass storage. These babies technically could last forever.
Wedding photos storage, anyone?
Read more here.
http://gizmodo.com/5946110/this-piece-of-glass-can-store-data-forever
