It's possible to reverse engineer data you have forgotten how to read.

It's impossible to read data that you know how to read, but it has become annihilated by time.

The former is far more valuable.

“What if the future computer systems simply aren’t compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it’s even recognized as storage media to test)?”

We've reconstructed archaic languages that no living person speaks from fragments of written records, I find it unlikely that we'll be completely unable to reverse engineer an ancient file system architecture - especially since the most likely course for someone actually reading one of these 1000's of years in the future is for the reader to be from a more technologically advanced civilization.

Think of what modern archeologists would give to have the equivalent of a wikipedia archive from 10,000 years ago - imagine the colossal amounts of grant funding that would be thrown at the problem if we even suspected such a thing was within reach.

Of course all the other issues about keeping the actual system safe for 10k years are totally valid, but you have to start somewhere, and getting a data storage system that can last that long even in perfect conditions is the necessary first step.

Might as well ask what's indicative of stone tablets from millennia ago being data to us now? These things aren't discovered and studied in a vacuum. They operate within context - where the items were found, their similarity to other better understood things, known history of data storage, etc etc.

Given enough time and disruption, sure, all context could be lost, but if that's the case, I'd assume figuring out what the weird glass cube thing is would be the least of their problems.

I would think that you could leave a Rosetta Stone with directions on how the data is stored and read. It wouldn't take much, I think. "These glass things contain information, here's how it is encoded. Here's the requirements on reading these". You could start off simple and have a rudimentary one that can be deciphered by hand that describes how to make a device that can quickly pull information from a few others that give directions on how to build another device to read the high capacity ones. You don't need a specific filesystem or computer to read it, you just need to know how to decipher it and that it IS data stored in a certain way, not just cool looking glass art.

More importantly than the filesystem formats, for media I hope they're using codecs that are as simple and as close to raw as possible, eg: PCM and BMP. Chances are pretty high that with something like PCM data, even if nobody had any idea what it was, at some point somebody would stumble upon turning it into audio. I can't imagine ever successfully decoding HEVC data without a specification.

proceeds to drop the hard drive

"Well... shit."

What is glass except just a bunch of really tiny Stones melted together?

And the best porn humanity has to offer, handpicked for preservation.

Sadly?

I've seen that anime and I don't care how old she is, she still looks way too young to be dressed like that.

I've always wondered what if there are multiple paths forward. Like the next people will be completely and unrecognisably different. We could be being bombarded with information from a former civilisation and we don't know because we are just completely different.

Like if we never figured out wireless but had everything else, the history of the world could be being broadcast on the radio and we wouldn't know it.

The Voyager records came with the player and instructions for the hopeful alien discoverer to use.

But I don't actually need it.