The year is 2245. The heirs finally locate a working, antique reader that can handle the ancient USB key, hoping to find great-great-grandpa's crypto-wallet or the pin-code to a long-lost Maltese bank account.

Instead, they find a 4-bit, VGA-quality scan of Miss October.

An actual book stores more data than that and for longer. At that point, why not just etch the data onto a metal plate or something? 8K is only a few pages of text at 12pt. It could easily fit onto two sides of a small-ish metal plate, etched in 8pt or so, and it would last, potentially, for millennia.

1. Print out 8KB on high quality paper.
2. Store in good environment...

So your 8KB of data will last forever, but what about the firmware required to access it running on flash?

As the old saying goes: What could a person need more than 8KB for?

I'm going to get one for my favicon.

I would be surprised if you couldn't get 8KB for 200 years out of standard flash simply by extreme duplication

8GB/8KB means a million copies on one (very small by today's standards!) drive.

Or is the failure mechanism something other than bitrot?

Kinda funny, I was just writing about archival media this morning. Verbatim makes DVDs & Blue Rays that last ~100 years, and M-DISC makes ones that'll last ~1000 years. And the Verbatim Blu Rays run ~$0.036 per gig.

Somewhat better than this useless USB thingy (from Temu?)

https://futurism.com/memory-that-lasts-forever-new-quartz-coin-can-store-360tb-of-data-for-14-billion-years

Summary by Andisearch

Researchers have developed a new quartz coin that can store 360TB of data for 14 billion years. This is a significant improvement from the previous quartz glass storage, which could only store data for 300 million years. The technique uses femtosecond laser pulses to write data in the 3D structure of quartz at the nanoscale. This makes it possible to store the whole of human history in a small coin-sized device. The storage system is also very durable, able to withstand high temperatures. This technology could potentially serve as a means of archiving important information for future generations or even extraterrestrial beings.

Will the chip actually last that long though? I would have expected a ceramic package with gold plated leads, not a plastic SOP-8.

You mean my 2GB Kingston that I bought in 2007, that I rarely use anymore won’t last me 200 years? Damn…

The other flash chip storing program code for the rp2040 will decay before then making the longevity marketing dumb

Kind of hard to return this after 195 years if it fails.

what about physical damage. or emp or something. I feel like that will be a problem well before 200 years.

future firmware updates are expected to include encryption features

Just use GnuPG. SMH

The more you read is just gets wilder and wilder.

I'm admittedly interested now.

I'm pretty sure my PGP keyring is bigger than that

FRAM module? Seriously?