The novel about this is Neal Stephenson's Anathem... where people strive to keep just the necessary information alive (like, "Where did we store the atomic wast

The novel about this is Neal Stephenson's Anathem... where people strive to keep just the necessary information alive (like, "Where did we store the atomic waste a couple of 1000 years ago?"). No matter how your data is going to be stored, it will eventually have to be copied to another medium. And if you want to store it "forever", you will get data corruption, either because of transmission errors or because the storage medium fails. Keeping the data redundant is not enough for guaranteed data safety, as no matter how many copies you create, one day all of them can fail at the same time. But you can take steps to ensure that your data is realistically safe for say a 1000 years (which is not by any means "forever", but then who but an archaeology AI will read your data at that time). The Long Now Foundation is thinking about stuff like this (http://www.longnow.org/ http://www.longnow.org/). An interesting question is, how do you ensure that your data will not be intentionally wiped out, because it is deemed (religiously, politically, legally) offensive? A metal band's CD cover is now considered dangerously close to child porn here abouts (Scorpions, Virgin Killer). That may be enough to make some people erase your data for decency's sake. A dead man can not fight a cease and desist order. A different view on the matter would be: you are going to die, and your data is going to die eventually. And even if it is around, it's likely that no one will want to read it anyway. But your existence will have consequences for the rest of (human) history, as just by living you provide an input to the human race. This input may be in the form of biological data (children) or pure information (a blog article about "forever storage" which inspires the next great startup founder to do great things). Just go on, do something positive besides leaving a huge carbon footprint and atomic waste that lasts for a million years.