Clay tablets seem to work pretty well as long as you store them well...
If the electricity dies all of it does.
Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
71–77 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Individual books can last much longer than a hundred years. Worst case, engrave it on a clay tablet and bury it in a bog.
the question is more about making the content readable by his progeny. Otherwise, encode into bitcoin ledger, done.
That’s taking the bet that the Bitcoin ledger will be easier to read than bog tablets 100 years from now.
Re: Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
#73interesting. I assume the things I host at home (which is everything) will be recoverable by family at time of my death if they're so interested. I left some instructions in will, but not for things I ought to, on reconsider, like "what" the thermostat is and how to access it beyond the web interface...
-but I do not plan for longer-term than that; I assume if kid cares, she'll bother repackaging it. I am curious about some of the non-book solutions. I think you might be able to rig up a solar solution, burying a box underground with an SBC/mini-PC with SATA or NVMe connectors; the SSD should be fully read from at least once a year. The solar should be degraded-but-fine after 50 years (excluding animal damage, which I find is pretty substantial if you keep them close to the ground... will want redundancy), but the battery will not be, but I haven't been around for long enough to really have a "feel" for how long LiFePO4/other cells will last... I wouldn't be surprised if they could go >20 years with very shallow discharge cycles in a degraded state (perfectly usable for having an SBC read drives once a year), but I'd be very surprised if you could get a standard cell to 50 years.
I tried getting a tape drive a few years ago. I bought a used one off Amazon, but HPE refused to give me the software for it; I wound up refunding it rather grumpily. It'd be pretty surprising if the tape drive lasted for 100 years (edit: interfaceable probably the bigger issue), but under careful conditions with ~no use, the tape cartridge itself should last 30-50 years (with no guarantees; you'll want redundancy on different batches/brands).
I would also add software solutions like PaperBack to the pile of paper storage ideas. Essentially, you create a giant compressed QR code printed to a sheet of paper, and this is like going from storing audio as uncompressed audio on CDs/DVDs to mp3 (DVD-MP3 was underrated!); instead of storing 500 words, you can store an entire book. There's not terrible complexity here, so it should be trivial to reverse-engineer, especially if you include a couple page of notes on how the algorithm works. -or heck, in 100 years, maybe a 50-year-old LLM can simply look at it and read it like you wrote words.
Re: Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that Internet will still exist in 100 years
The Internet Archive would not require the Internet to continue to store digital data, nor to ingest additional digital data. As long as the bills get paid and people watch the machine, the data would remain on disk and accessible. The Library of Congress has existed for ~225 years, for example.
There's a huge difference though between storing books, magazines and newspapers versus storing digital media.
Re: Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Internet Archive would not require the Internet to continue to store digital data, nor to ingest additional digital data. As long as the bills get paid and people watch the machine, the data would remain on disk and accessible. The Library of Congress has existed for ~225 years, for example.
There's a huge difference though between storing books, magazines and newspapers versus storing digital media.
One requires more electricity than the other, and custodians of somewhat different skills. A sysadmin is a librarian and custodian with technology skills. If you can vault and custodian physical archives at scale, you can do the same for digital data (imho, based on experience with both). You’re simply building resilient systems on durable primitives.
I’m hopeful for a future where you can potentially carry all recorded knowledge on a device and media you can fit in something somewhat human portable [1]. But until then, humans interested will maintain and continually improve archival and information retrieval systems to preserve and make accessible knowledge.
[1] SPhotonix – 360TB into 5-inch glass disc with femtosecond laser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268911 - December 2025 (27 comments)
Re: Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
#76Putting static copies on Github Pages, Cloudflare Pages, and the Internet Archive would make pretty good odds it's preserved. The only real way to make sure would be to set up and fund some sort of trust to basically hire someone to run it after you're gone.
I think that this is probably the most realistic / sensible suggestion here if you want to preserve digital data for as long as possible.
(and assuming you don't have millions of dollars handy to put towards this goal - I could probably build you something pretty OK, but the cost might get into tens of millions or more depending on how many nines you want on that "chance of it existing in 100 years" figure)
I also agree with others who say "print out multiple redundant copies and put them in filing cabinets and/or bank vaults". This is probably the most reliable way to have a high probability of it lasting that long without spending a lot.
The core issue that you're going to have is that it's impossible to predict whether any institution you might trust to hold on to the data will still exist in 100 years. Having multiple copies on multiple redundant hosts gives you a higher chance, but it's still not possible to say what that chance is. And that's before we start thinking about things like climate change and the water wars everyone loves to predict.
Re: Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
#77Encode it in the favicon, I think Google's cache is at least that long.