Makes me think of the write-only storage medium used in space ship black boxes in the Gap series by Steven Donaldsson.
Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#42These kinds of technologies have been tried before (and largely abandoned.) The real problem in long term data storage is figuring out how to interpret decades old binary formats for which the software no longer exists. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand perfect PDFs if Adobe has been out of business for a hundred years.
The other issue with long term data storage is that the whole advantage of using digital technologies in the first place is that data is easy to copy. Using specialty technologies like this totally nullifies that advantage.
If your goal is simply long-term data storage/archival, you'd do better to just use durable and popular media of the day, to maintain an index of your collection, and to upgrade/migrate your media and file formats regularly to keep up with the times. If you're going for really long term storage, such that might go multiple human lifespans without being needed or needing maintenance, you might as well just skip the digital to begin with.
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#43Following the news spam after news spam, here is the AFP story all the submitted page and "sources" copied from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hrS0Kp5RL...
If you look starting 6 days ago, this story has been submitted 5 previous times.
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#44How about a disc that is made of glass, has a capacity of a DVD and can be read by standard dvd players and can be bought today, for a mere of €160? THIS is amazing. http://www.syylex.com/index.php/home_english.html
The reflective layer is still made of metal and the two layers are glued together. You have to take the maker's words on how durable those actually are.
Well, sure - but even if the reflective layer loosens, you still have the glass layer - then it would be the same as the hitachi concept: read the glass pits with a miroscope. Or add a new reflective layer.
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#45These kinds of technologies have been tried before (and largely abandoned.) The real problem in long term data storage is figuring out how to interpret decades old binary formats for which the software no longer exists. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand perfect PDFs if Adobe has been out of business for a hundred years. The other issue with long term data storage is that the whole advantage of using digital te…
You could potentially store them inside/along with a virtual machine image which would be capable of rendering them, and then document the crap out of the VM (which would require as few, and as simple, external interfaces as possible), such that it could be easily re-created/ported to future OSes.
I think quite a few places where continuity over decade timescales (especially in the embedded world) are storing VM images with the exact versions of various parts of the toolchain they use, to ensure compatibility.
And of course, there's plenty of precedent with things like the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator[1], as well as things like VMWare, Bochs, QEMU, etc.
I think I've come across old DOS games being re-released wrapped with dosbox or something similar as a compat layer for modern OSes.
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The oldest stuff NASA has out there is what, 35 years old? Hardly a "very long life". And it's floating in vacuum, which is pretty much the ideal storage environment. Making stuff last in space is much easier than on Earth (and much easier than getting it there, of course).
It seems that the high levels of radiation could make it much less than the ideal storage environment
Plus temperature extremes.
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#47Just to be a smartass: I guess it will last for a significant timespan, but not actually "forever" unless Hitachi also finds out how to reverse entropy or how to leave this universe. If they don't a lot of stuff might get their data, like proton-decay, the upcoming black hole era or the fact that everything is liquid on very large timescales. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fu…
The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.
One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.
Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.
Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"
AC said, "Hang on, I have the answer inscribed on a Hitachi glass tablet somewhere."
-- Isaac Asimov, "The Last Tablet"
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#48Maybe the medium will last longer, but isn't "If you have a computer with the right software and an optical microscope hooked up to it" a big part of the data decay problem on floppy disks etc.? Even if the data is there, it's useless without the right software/hardware to read it.
If it's actual visual dots on the glass, it sounds like you'd just need to figure out how to get a good enough photograph of the thing to see the dots in and spend an afternoon whipping up an image processing script in Python to convert the dots to binary code. This sounds a lot simpler than whatever would be involved in setting up the apparatus to read bits of volatile magnetic media where you'd have to interact mor…
Those are good point. I guess I was more curious about how the data is stored — say someone 100 years from now picks one of these up and wants to read the data. Will the format in which it's stored prevent them from doing so?
Re: Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's actual visual dots on the glass, it sounds like you'd just need to figure out how to get a good enough photograph of the thing to see the dots in and spend an afternoon whipping up an image processing script in Python to convert the dots to binary code. This sounds a lot simpler than whatever would be involved in setting up the apparatus to read bits of volatile magnetic media where you'd have to interact mor…
Those are good point. I guess I was more curious about how the data is stored — say someone 100 years from now picks one of these up and wants to read the data. Will the format in which it's stored prevent them from doing so?
A very simple format would be regular fixed dot patterns (⣿) corresponding to bytes, spaced a apart a bit. Then it's the user's responsibility to be sensible and encode stuff without too clever compression. This wouldn't guard against trying to read the image sideways or upside down though.
If you get a disc with ASCII text and can read the bits a 100 years from now, even if ASCII coding is lost to history, as long as you can figure out the thing is supposed to contain writing that uses 8 bits per letter, and still know English, a trivial pattern analysis gets you the code table you can use to read the text.
The plaintext can then be used to describe the formats for whatever other data the disk may contain.