How will your personal data be readable 2.000 years from now ? The Long Now Foundation blogs about a nickel-based 3 inches-large disk that can reliably hold high amount of printed data for at least 2.000 years. Data is printed on it in small font : a 750-power optical microscope is required to read the pages !
On the other side of the blogosphere, the reprap community considers adding an ElectroChemical Milling (ECM) tool head to their home DIY 3D printers :
With this tool head, it could machine any conductive material, regardless of how hard it is or how high its melting point.
Maybe someday, personal very-long term backups will be printed at home ?
At the moment, industrial ECM/EDM machines can « achieve a one micron positional accuracy and wire EDM walls as thin as 0.010” (.254mm) » or (ECM) make holes/traces as small as 0.2 mm large. I guess some progress is required before 750-power optical microscopes are required for reading data printed with this technology. But maybe that before 2.000 years from now, ultra-precision will be achieved by fabbers ? Id be curious of knowing which technique was used by the Long Now Foundation project and how difficult it would be to port this technique to the wonderful world of fabbers.
A similar technique has recently been used for creating an official limited-edition 5 Euros coin. With the help of Python as the programming language of the designer.