Combine Legos and storage.  Combine play and backups.  However the Sony Microvault Tiny is so much more compact.

LED magnets: Surely, banned in Boston.

Rakkav brings to my attention Kevin Kelly’s post on the Very Long-Term Backup, (Also at the The Long Now Foundation blog) discussing the Rosetta Project.

Storage that must outlast civilization must service neglect. Stone or paper in stone containers lasts. Readable print on these media don’t need devices to be read.

WordPerfect… [at] the height of its popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the de facto standard word processor, but has since been eclipsed in sales by Microsoft Word. – Wikipedia

With exponential growth in storage capacity you can move data from old to new storage. Capacity is not the problem. Neglect and abandonment is. File formats of the copied data suffers the same. WordPerfect was at the top of the game until the masses moved to Microsoft Word. You may have copied WordPerfect files, but if you abandoned WordPerfect, or a computer that could run your copy, the data is good as lost. This is why the “text” media type is so wonderful.

An interesting characteristic of many such representations is that they are to some extent readable even without the software that interprets them. RFC 2046

Removable media is disadvantaged for it’s small size. You need a stack of DVDs to store it all. Previously, you needed a stack of CDs, Zip disks, floppies, or tapes. Removable media is economical and has some advantages. The only backup The Planet sells is online; no removable media. It’s big enough and conveniently always there. The data will last as long you care; backup, copy, keep it organized. (…and pay for the service.)

Next, I should look at the Long Server

The Long Server is the over-arching program for Long Now’s digital continuity software projects. Most recently we released an open source Timeline tool dubbed the Long Viewer, and are now working on a file format conversion project called The Format Exchange funded by the Elektra Foundation and Omidyar.net.

So good it’s worth repeating:

“They say if you play the Windows Vista CD backward, you can hear satanic words.” “Oh, that’s nothing. If you play it forward it installs Windows Vista…!” (Oldie but goldie, via.) – Jan-Piet Mens

Be sure to also see Jan-Piet Mens‘ The Tao of Backup. While on the subject of backups, see The Admin Zen page on Backup:

1. Nobody wants backup, everybody wants restore.
2. To restore, you need a backup.
3. Have a backup.
4. RAID is not a backup.
5. There’s more to save than just the files.
6. Devices need backup too.
7. Even expensive hardware can fail catastrophically.
8. Do not hit the enter key before thinking about it.
9. Consistent against corruption.
10. Secure from disasters.
11. Protected from prying eyes.

– The Admin Zen: Backup