OT: 1000 year DVD storage

Yes and no. DVDs, and CDs, do not have file structure per se. They are very much like ordinary disk drives in that respect - while they do have a little more structure (they have a rudimentary partitioning scheme, "tracks", which exists on ordinary disks only by software convention but on CDs and presumably DVDs is actually part of the medium format), they are basically just big arrays of blocks. (The blocks on a CD are 2K, as opposed to most disk drives' half-K blocks, but compared to the similarities that's a trivial difference.) File structure is most often, probably, ISO 9660, usually (as someone else noted) with extensions for things like sane filenames. But there is nothing about a CD or DVD that compels, nor even prefers, that; if you want to, you can build a FAT32 image, or an FFS image, or whatever takes your fancy, and burn it to a data track. 9660 is optimized for read-only (and write-once) media, but that's really its major advantage for the purpose (in isolation from things like ubiquity of software support, which is mostly a question of history). I think printed paper has it beat, provided you use real ink (rather than, say, typical laser-printer toner). And, of course, good-quality paper, and designed-for-long-term storage conditions (inert atmosphere and the like). The major advantages I see of CDs and DVDs are (1) storage density (bits per, eg, cubic inch) and (2) near-term ease of getting the information back into a computer. I actually think clay tablets baked in a building fire are about the longest-lasting data storage medium we know of at this point. But, compared to the age of the most durable storage media (like those clay tablets), actually thinking about data storage in terms longer than a century or two is a recent innovation; we can't really do more than guess what various media lifetimes will be. Even if they are relatively educated guesses in many cases.... /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B