DOTS

DOTS is a format for long-term data storage intended to survive a hypothetical "digital dark age". It is an optically-read system originally developed by Kodak in the 1990s and picked up later by a group of former Kodak employees; it is being promoted by the Long Now Foundation. It consists of a "phase change alloy" making marks in accordance with an encoding scheme, which is explained in a human-readable microfiche-scale header.

Links

 * What is DOTS?
 * Long Now Foundation blog posting
 * Fileformats blog posting