Ask HN: How to protect digital information if there is a nuclear war

2 points by thraneh 4 years ago | 4 comments

Being located in Europe it suddenly seems a possibility that nuclear attacks could happen. It occurred to me that the storage of digital information possibly could be at risk during or after a nuclear incident. (This question obviously assumes one is located at some distance from strategic targets.) An online search didn't immediately help me answer this question. Does anyone know? Any difference for HDD or SSD?

scrapheap 4 years ago |

A Faraday Cage should give some protection from an EMP - you could probably build a good one for very little money.

There would certainly be differences between HDD and SSD, which I'll be interested to hear about.

Depending on the size of the digital information that you want to store then I'd be inclined for going for a solution that would also give you redundancy (i.e. multiple copies of your data spread over multiple faraday cages)

thraneh 4 years ago | |

That's what I thought too. A basement with concret walls/floor/ceiling should have enough rebar to act like a Faraday cage.

It's not a lot of information (say, <1GB), but it's business critical and I'm somewhat distrustful of cloud solutions.

scrapheap 4 years ago | | |

If you have a small set of really important data to protect that doesn't change regularly then you can always make it EMP proof by printing it out.