You don't need to store your data. It's already there in PI. Find the location and pass it to your descendants.
Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#22Just use a regular spinning hard drive, not any kind of solid state media. Solid state media must be charged and accessed periodically to retain its contents, like RAM, but billions of times slower. 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 slo…
Regular hard drives are storing data through magnetic voodoo. Which means they will lose charge and thus data over time. And time here is measured in decades, not centuries. In fact, regular hard drives are even worse than SSD. Though, it all depends on the specific devices, how you store and handle them. There are also dedicated archive-HDDs, which are supposed to hold a bit longer than normal HDDs, but even they only promise decades. In general, for Anything longer than 50 years, don't even think about HDDs and SSDs.
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#230. Buy archive paper and a printer and ink/toner that are certified for 200 years.
Print out the specs of all the file formats you store. And of the filesystem, too.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#24You're asking a technical question, which is the wrong way to go here.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#250. Buy archive paper and a printer and ink/toner that are certified for 200 years. Print out the specs of all the file formats you store. And of the filesystem, too. 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…
> Use endurance SDCards.
"As a computer, i find your trust in technology, amusing"
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#26"GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository on 02/02/2020 and preserved that data in the Arctic Code Vault. [...] will last 1,000 years" https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ As startup founder my question is if anybody would pay for such a service?
> will last 1,000 years"
"Review comment: 2023-12-20 JD: Testcase TBD." /s
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#27Just use a regular spinning hard drive, not any kind of solid state media. Solid state media must be charged and accessed periodically to retain its contents, like RAM, but billions of times slower. 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 slo…
Drive bearings may not last 200 years. Drive electronics almost certainly won't last 200 years - especially the capacitors.
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#280. Buy archive paper and a printer and ink/toner that are certified for 200 years. Print out the specs of all the file formats you store. And of the filesystem, too. 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…
> Use endurance SDCards. "As a computer, i find your trust in technology, amusing"
Personally, I have very good experiences with FLASH, and very bad experiences with spinning disc HDDs, CDROMs, DVDs.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Use endurance SDCards. "As a computer, i find your trust in technology, amusing"
Personally, I have very good experiences with FLASH, and very bad experiences with spinning disc HDDs, CDROMs, DVDs. 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.
Flash data retention is about 10 years.
And with ROHS everything is a smoking gun.
Re: Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?
#30No one has ever stored any non trivial amount of data from a computing system that long that we know of. You would in fact be the first person to do so.
CIA and NSA would like to have a word with you. :)) /s
Anyway, they don't usually talk about their archival capabilities.