It depends on your goal, there's long term storage that assumes we'll retain the technology and knowledge required to read it (or it will be easily reproduced,

It depends on your goal, there's long term storage that assumes we'll retain the technology and knowledge required to read it (or it will be easily reproduced, ie the reader technology is trivial to produce in the future because technology has advanced really far) and then there's the civilization restart archive that assumes we'll be anywhere from cave people up to basically where we are today. Really for the second type I think both the macro scale and a micro scale (though not digitally encoded for most of it) in combination along with something like the Rosetta Disk [0] from the Long Now project is probably the way to ensure it's actually readable. The large scale text would provide a boot strap to get optics set up that could read the smaller etched text on archives that could then setup the tech to read the even finer etched stuff and so on maybe eventually reaching disks like the one in the article where we're able to store digital files and the knowledge to read them was introduced in more human readable formats. [0] http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/