Nanofiche: Small Storage, for Forever
> <i>The only sure-fire way to guarantee that important information can be recovered in the event of a catastrophic event, is to back it up with specialized archival media that are designed to survive and be recoverable, even without access to computers and electronics.</i><p>I mean, I guess you don't need a computer to read this, but you sure do need a good microscope.<p>I guess I'm not really entirely sure of the point. If you're really trying to preserve basic knowledge to restart civilization, I'd think you'd want libraries of full-size readable books spread across the world. Not something that requires you to first build a microscope.<p>While if you're trying to store as much historical and technological data as possible, it seems like you'd want to encode it digitally with error correction codes, not as optically readable text. The encoding/decoding instructions can easily fit on a single cover page, optically encoded.