Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years? Let's say that I want to store my data for 200 years so that my great-great-great grand children can access it. The data I want to store include: images, text, videos. What should I do? |
Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years? Let's say that I want to store my data for 200 years so that my great-great-great grand children can access it. The data I want to store include: images, text, videos. What should I do? |
1. Make sure you have all the faces in the photos labeled in a way that can be accessed in the future. Old physical photos without the names written on the back are essentially worthless, as nobody knows who they are. Full names, and how everyone is related, perhaps a bit of story is important.
2. Make sure your kids are interested in this stuff, or your grandkids. If they don't want it, it's all going to be pitched out, and you're wasting your time. My child has expressed a desire for a modest subset of my 650 Gb of personal photos. I'm going to weed it wayyyyy down for her, and make sure all the photos are labeled correctly and completely.
3. Make sure they have sufficient income to live their lives, and also pay for a new hard drive from time to time, to copy the information forward in time. A box of photos is generally quite easy to store, if you have a home.
PS: Am I the old man here? Nobody else mentioned this angle yet, and to me it seems to be the most obvious.
We have photographs that are 100 years old. I have floppy disks from the 1980s that can still be read. Books from the 1800s. Tools over 100 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
The company claim is 1000 years of storage life. Independent testers have rated it for up to several hundred years.
The main drawback is ensuring that DVD / Blu-ray readers still exist that far into the future.
A slightly cheaper lifehack - have the data official published and get it submitted to the Library of Congress who will preserve it for you.
Copies in multiple physical locations. Copies on paper if it's text. Digital copies on tapes and archive quality DVDs. Storage in low UV, low moisture, low everything fireproofed faraday cages.
Store some complete hardware along with some copies for helping to access the data, along with instructions.
Then assume all of that will fail and take a load of money and put it in a trust so it can be accessed at intervals to your descendents upon instructions in your will where an executor (who is also paid well) can verify that they've done the work to copy your data to the new types of media of the day. Include detailed instructions so that the monetary rewards based off a 1% skim off the growth of the invested funds to increase the chance of the investments lasting through generations. Ensure that the executor can pass being an executor on to future generations through additional financial rewards.
Or just don't worry about it. If it's sentimental data have it live on through stories and good memories :)
If Faraday cage holes are smaller than the gamma ray wavelength, does it protect against gamma rays? Or is a thick lead wall needed for M-Disc protection? Is it even possible to construct such small cage holes?
gamma rays = electromagnetic waves
Preserving an M-Disc against a nuclear blast seems futile, as the high temperatures can turn even stone into dust. Is there even a practical way to engineer survival in a nuclear blast? (Any physicists? Engineers?)
Here's a guide on making a Faraday cage, but can it also protect against gamma rays?
Probably not. Might need to throw in some lead, concrete and water barriers.
I wrote my answer as pretty tongue in cheek. It gets to a stage where certain threats being solved for would wipe out humanity anyway, which is why my last suggestion is summarising the lessons of your data into stories and parables to be passed on from generation to generation :)
For the future wha I think it is promissing:
- Microsoft project Silica https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfEYd4NGQg&list=WL&index=5
- 5D optical data storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
- DNA Data Storage. To use DNA to store vast amounts of digital data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage
Spinning hard disks use aluminum platters coated in an extremely purified layer of iron oxide (rust) all of which is super chemically stable. Once written your data will remain stable for hundreds of years until it is slowly ripped off the disk over time by gravity.
These drive are mechanical and the mechanics will fail far earlier so the data will need to be extracted from the disk directly by some invasive means. People already do this now to extract valuable data from damaged disks.
Or like a stone tablet,
1. If the data can be in the open, use archive.org. They assume a cost of 2 USD/GB, so please donate an appropriate amount.
2. As other commenters proposed, use M-DISC. But you must deposit M-Disc reader(s) and the hardware to drive those, and better be redundant.
3. Use endurance SDCards. They can be read (and written) by just 4 wires. Use UDF as filesystem. Print out the SDCard specs. Make sure you and your descendants put power to the SDCards every 5 years or so to refresh the cells.
"As a computer, i find your trust in technology, amusing"
IMHO, all long term cold storage is not reliable. Better to go with mid-term storage, and not just using one technology. For really important data, I would go for LTO AND BD AND SD card and maybe some paid online storage.
That stuff have a proven shelf life, compared to all the digital alternatives.
As a bonus, write it by hand or get a robot to mimic your handwriting. I believe your grand children (if they still can read handwriting) will get a small glimpse of your personality.
Consider the rarity of Betamax players, early cellulite film. Obscure media like M-Discs I don't know if there will be players around in 50 years (zip drives anyone?). Or how people won't recognize the media if found in storage.
I feel acid-free paper and ink is still the best for archival. We have 8mm film from my grandparents that are about 60 years old, and my family was able to convert it to digital.
Given how easily hardware gets outdated, I would guess that a book-like apparatus made of plastic with the data pressed rather than written and a place to put it so that it's protected from the elements and whatever might damage it. It is your best bet now. Better yet, harden glass with the data etched into it.
Images, videos and others, attach a text file with the format description, syntax and structure, who knows if in 200 years people still use jpg or mpeg or how to read/decode them.
I have some very old games with binary formats without any additional information, reversing them takes a lot of time, so, other than the physical medium, remember that what we take for granted today, might not be tomorrow.
Hence, keeping "unused" electronics around might be wise, given the so called "unpredictable future" and supply chain interruptions.
Arguably, old and slow tech is still better than having nothing, as you do not have to do these boring computations by hand.
Good luck.
PS: ask your kids if they want the stuff you are trying to impose on them first. They might not want it.
Hardly anybody alive today wants their grandparent’s vacation slides. You thinking A) that you’re going to have great-great-great grandchildren and B) that they’re going to want pictures you took 200 years ago?
https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
As startup founder my question is if anybody would pay for such a service?
"Review comment: 2023-12-20 JD: Testcase TBD." /s
Jeff Barr agrees too: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-as-an-eternal-service/
Anyway, they don't usually talk about their archival capabilities.
!