What is the best technology for archiving data?

This could drive a lot of technology-oriented people nuts, but probably the best long-term storage ever developed is writing on paper - i.e., books. The great thing with this, of course, is that no reading device is needed at all!

While it may sound a little primitive, paper and the written word have already stood the test of time quite well. The proof is in the fact that you can easily get and read books that are hundreds of years old. Playing an eight-track tape, on the other hand, is all but impossible now.

You could argue that there are a lot of data that can't be represented as text, but anything that you can make digital (which is pretty much everything) can be printed out as a series of ones and zeros or other symbols. Even if we lost the technology to translate the digital code, we could still "access" the data by simply reading it, and making our own translation, if needed.

And any fairly advanced future technology similar to what we have now could be made to electronically read text and transfer it to whatever format is in vogue.

Paper, if it's properly made and cared for, is very light and robust. While durability is a concern, perhaps a greater danger is losing track of what the written symbols mean. Lest this sound like a trivial issue, consider the example of Egyptian hieroglyphs. When they were written - in stone, no less - they were widely available for all to see. But over time people just forgot about what they meant, and the meaning was lost for centuries, until they were deciphered in relatively recent times.

This Dr. Knowledge entry was written by physicist John Swain at Northeastern University. E-mail questions to drknowledge@globe.com or write Dr. Knowledge, c/o The Boston Globe, PO Box 55819, Boston, MA 02205-5819.