I’m positing 2 systems for long term storage:
A paper system for the medium term (up to a thousand years)
A (gold alloy plates?) system for up to 10,000 years or longer.
The purpose of both systems is to preserve knowledge and information through a cultural collapse, similar to the fall of the Roman Empire. The most likely in the near term is would be a global war with weapons of mass destruction. Which is likely to destroy infrastructure and existing devices to the point that the rebuilding culture will not have the ability to replicate them for at least a hundred years after the event. When they replicate them, the situation will be different and not connected to ours. After several hundred years they have no reason to build their systems to our standards. in the intervening hundreds of years the data may be lost as the storage media may not be understood and used or repurposed for raw materials.
If the next civilization has informational continuity with us, to the point that they have always had access to computers that can read our data, they likely have a copy of GoogleBooks readily available. I am discussing techniques of storing data in a way that a culture that has a nearly blank slate, a complete or semi-complete loss of civilization and technology could recognize and access the data. This becomes most important if you want to send data thousands of years into the future.
We can’t read some 3000 year old human languages, but we can recognize them as language and preserve them for the future so that the information may be deciphered when new clues or better computing takes a shot at it. If we store information for long jumps on media that isn’t obviously data, media that requires complex tools, programming and electricity to read, then that data will morel likely be lost then data on stone tablets, or metal plates or some other human readable stable storage media.
If they do recognize the optical disc as a storage media and read it with a microscope and camera, they will have a stream of binary bits, yes? those bits would refer to standards we use like ASCII, which may or may not have survived. There will also be bits delineating the file format, file system etc.
Let’s say that we get a disc for an alternate Earth where Xerox PARC never happened and they developed their own binary system to encode text, video, audio and other file types. The disc isn’t encrypted, but it is formatted for HAL 12.5, their Windows 2000, equal in every way, but where their binary and programming doesn’t overlap with ours. From the raw binary, could computer science as we know it decode and parse the file system? Determine how to display a video? Or better yet, could they decipher a Windows 2000 formatted CD with muiltimedia files? There are just too many factors and random chance for it to be simple.
Again, I suppose that some of the written primers could be written to describe ASCII, filesystem etc. but that won’t make any sense to a pre-computing culture. We can’t know at what level the the culture that finds the data will be at. Perhaps they’ll have quantum computing, perhaps they’ll have just discovered steel. They may have optics to notice that there are bits on the discs, perhaps they’ll assume they are just a store of “money”.
