Actually magnetic tape can deteriorate over time just sitting on the shelf, leading to tape that moves at an uneven speed through the player, with attendant audio problems.
Don’t believe the movies. EMP is mostly a problem for power lines and telephone lines where you have miles of copper in which the pulse can build up an electric surge. A pulse will blow out the power grid infrastructure as well as toast any devices connected to the grid (an EMP strikes too fast for surge protectors to work). Ditto the coax cable network that delivers your TV, and ditto telephone landlines (so your modem and router are toast).
OTOH, if a device is not connected to the grid (say a phone or a hard drive not connected to mains power), then averse effects will be minimal to none unless it’s big. Computer components that are offline and mobile devices should emerge completely unscathed - the leads on their PCBs are too short to build up a serious pulse.
Cars are just barely big enough to be vulnerable - in experiments, some stalled from an EMP, some did not, and most restarted just fine afterwards (the research was done in the late 90’s so the fate of electronics in cars is an unknown).
Yes, I have been reading up on Cold War themes lately. Because it’s all become relevant again now that we have morons and egomaniacs running things.
ETA: surge protectors that actually work would help. Most surge protectors are only good for a few years and then silently become nothing more than a power bar because the surge detecting circuit wears out over time.
EMP should have a longer wavelength but higher amplitude than lightning, because it operates over longer distances. So I wonder if it just causes a normal lightning arrester to break down and go open circuit.
Cannot re-find the page, but found another credible resource that says the opposite. The amount of insane prepper nonsense disguised as valid information on this topic in the top ranked Google searches is extreme and it looks like I failed to detect all the woo. I have edited my comment.
You don’t even have to punch your cards. Archivists have been preserving ink-on-paper data for centuries. It’s a proven archival technology. Something like a QR code printed on archival paper with the right ink stored in appropriate conditions could last ages. And the only hardware necessary to read it is a digital camera.
It’s slightly less altruistic; but that’s kind of a big IBM thing. Their System/360 devices were released with some eye to backwards compatibility in the early-mid 60s and every subsequent mainframe generation has had an eye towards backward compatibility with them.
I’m sure there are all manner of ghastly edge cases where this doesn’t apply; but if anyone sells you something where backward compatibility for software older than the salesman is one of the features it’s them.
Conveniently, you don’t even necessarily have to bake them properly.
They have a variety of vices; but clay tablets are probably the only storage medium where having your civilization burned to the ground just mounts your media read-only and ready for archiving.
… and some sort of image processing that reads out the QR code.
And some sort of documentation/manual to instruct future generations how the QR code was encoded.
This is Voyager’s Golden Record all over again…
If space is an issue: microfiches on archive film will last centuries when stored properly (which is a requirement for each and every material) and all you need to do to read it is to hold it up against a light source (like the sun) and use a magnifying glass.
No, EMP hazards don’t seem to have a schedule of affected parts and Faraday cage fail absolutism. There’s probably a fluidic computer someplace that will claim supereffectiveness for Russia’s jamming capabilities if a solar flare makes for wonkier things than overtemperature power distribution events. Take it apart and rebuild it, have backups in nitrogen vacancies (like, crystals: good twice a week!) and S5 tiers, and break out the old 3D:DS from a fire safe.
