A USB stick that will hold your precious data for 200 years, what's the catch? Er... it only holds 8kB

Many of us use flash memory sticks to temporarily store files for a while but only for a short time. One company has decided to offer something a bit special regarding the last aspect by creating a USB storage device rated to retain its data for up to 200 years. The only snag is that it holds just 8,192 bytes of data.

Yes, you read that right. Not 8GB, not 8MB—we're talking 8kB of information. That's a handful of pages in a standard text file, at the very most. That might seem an unusably...