Very Long-Term Backup (2008)

A lot of people seem to be conflating backups and archives. They are very much not the same thing. An archive has an archivist and an index. It has structure that makes it useful long after the system that created it has disappeared.<p>Some years ago when I was Unix sysadmin and responsible for backup I had a call from a draughtsman trying to find a rather important drawing. I asked him when he had seen it last, He said he wasn&#x27;t sure but that it must have been at least two years ago. He was totally flabbergasted when I pointed out that we recycle the backup tapes after twelve months and that there was very little chance that the file would be recoverable. It had never occurred to anyone in the company that an archive would be a good idea all the files were simply kept on live disks; quite remarkable really when you consider that the products often cost a million dollars and are expected to last half a century and be repairable to last even longer.<p>I have seen this almost everywhere I go. Large companies used to have libraries and librarians but now such things and such people are regarded as non-productive and hence to be wiped out.

M-DISC Blu-Ray discs are still one of the few affordable options for long term storage if the amount of data you want to preserve matches the medium&#x27;s capacity of 100GB per BD-XL disc. They should last 100 years or more (&quot;up to 1000 years&quot;). The 100GB BD-XL discs are quite expensive however (14€ each). They also seem to get harder to find.<p>If you have less data you can go with the 25GB M-DISC Blu-ray discs (more drives can read these) or even with their DVD-R discs.<p>Make sure to keep an external optical drive with USB-C around as well. I know that none of my PCs from the last 5 years had a builtin optical drive.<p>If you have more data, consider LTO drives and copy them every 5-15(?) years.

This continues to be a good point and for years my dad, a architect, has told the story of a wise(?) records department he consulted with that demanded their budget be spent on good passive temperature and humidity control for a bigger paper records storage space rather than power&#x2F;cooling for a small data center.<p>BUT.<p>I would not give up hope on old digital storage mediums. I have recently read a casually stored CD-R containing code i wrote 25 years ago with surprisingly no issues. I know of friends who have read the 40 year old floppies from their childhood after discovering them in the garage. My ROM based game cartridges also read fine after 2 decades in an unheated barn. curiousmarc and friends (youtuber) have read the runtime state of the memory of Apollo-era computers among other things.<p>Correspondingly, nearly all of the paper records I&#x27;ve come in contact with over the years have been disposed of, damaged or last (many of them pictures and memorabilia). I think the issue we face is a lot about choosing what to preserve more than what medium to preserve it in.

Related, does anyone have ideas or experience on backing up and preserving the digital artifacts of someone deceased? I’ve been meaning to do an “Ask HN” but this post is in line.<p>I’ve thought of putting the photos, videos, and document scans on archive.org. Also wondered about using IPFS or long-duration DVDs. And of course miniature archiving as in this post (But it sounds awfully expensive.)

Surprised nobody has mentioned the use of artificial DNA [0] in archival (e.g. Adaptive DNA Storage (ADS) Codec). Companies [0] exist to create the DNA today. Within a small volume and with an approach of high redundancy and generation of multiple copies (e.g. errors in reading are overcome by reading many copies and using probabilistic means to resolve). Still a ways to go, but DNA within biology has already proven itself to be resilient over long periods of time (oldest sample ever sequenced was 1.65M years ago[2], very compact in physical form for storage and easy to distribute&#x2F;store many redundant copies.<p>I&#x27;ve personally wondered what other types of biological processes could be mimicked to help with encryption (perhaps using some sort of enzymatic process to act as a gatekeeper to reading the DNA - this is totally outside of my expertise, so could be way off track). But fun to think about, nevertheless :-)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dna-the-ultimate-data-storage-solution&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dna-the-ultimate-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twistbioscience.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;video&#x2F;how-does-dna-data-storage-work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twistbioscience.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;video&#x2F;how-does-dna...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ancient_DNA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ancient_DNA</a>

I have been following The Long Now Foundation for around 20 years now, the clock was still just an idea when I first found out about them and the first model had yet to be built. From the first time I found out about them I wanted to contribute in some physical way, I wanted to have something that I made to be a part of it but for what ever reason I never pursued it. And now for what ever reason I decided to finally pursue it, I just wrote them a letter and that letter is now in the mailbox waiting for the mailman to pick it up.<p>I think they are right in the idea that humanity lost something important when it ceased building monuments and I hope I will be able to be a part of their monument in some way beyond the rather antithetical monetary fashion.<p>The thing I want to make more than anything for them is the actual key cap on the button people press or the knob on the lever which they pull to get the time, that thing which people will touch for 10,000 years to come. It is a tiny and ultimately insignificant piece of what they are doing and ultimately I would be thrilled to make anything related to the movement, but to make that insignificant piece that everyone who wants the time has to touch but has no real impact on purpose seems more meaningful than building the clock itself.<p>I don&#x27;t expect to get anything from them beyond a form letter, but maybe I will get to make the completely useless knob that sits on top of the lever which allows people to get something as banal as the current time for generations to come and that is their point. They succeeded in their goal when it comes to me, they got me to see humanity beyond what it is for me but for what it is I can offer them 10,000 years down the line even if all that is is a fleeting touch at the push of a button or a bench where they can rest their weary legs after hours of waiting in line to pull a lever or push a button so they can know what time it is.

This is a remarkable feat, no doubt. Without any prior knowledge about the project, however, it seems to be a geeky (and very fun) challenge rather than a real world problem. IOW it&#x27;s a solution for a non-existent problem.<p>First of all, humans have already solved this problem successfully with the invention of oral traditions. If you combine a stubborn social practice with a sufficiently effective and fault tolerant stenography, you should have storage that can reach 50K years (Australian aboriginals boast 60K+ years of records). IOW a record keeping written language and a social practice (like a religion) would have the practical survivability of oral traditions but a much higher storage capacity.<p>Second, and perhaps this should be first, why are we assuming our knowledge is even remotely relevant to the distant futures? Absolutely none of Ancient Egyptian science exists as practice today, their entire cultural horizon is dead (a corpse in Nietzschean terms) and the only ones with a devoted interest are an elite few in a science of archeology that has only existed once in humankind to our knowledge. That the future cultures have the social or biologic capacity or motivation for archeology let alone science rest upon some rather huge and unfounded assumptions.<p>The only thing I can think of that should be transferred 1000 years into the future which they also have a high probability of caring about regardless of what motivates them would be e.g. where we store nuclear waste.

Using Genesis doesn&#x27;t sound like such a good idea, a better approach might be some neutral text about nothing of any religous or cultural significance. How do you keep it from getting destroyed intentionally? Do you just hide it well enough in enough places and just hope the right people may find it in the future?

Is Long Now still going strong? It feels like I haven’t heard much from them in a while. Still a big fan.<p>Edit: and yes, I know they are philosophically opposed to doing anything quickly.

I hope there are suitable caveats around the Genesis text being mythology - I&#x27;d hate to imagine far-future generations scratching their heads at how otherwise technologically sophisticated people could image that this stuff was true.

Related:<p><i>Very Long-Term Backup</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=282572" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=282572</a> - Aug 2008 (28 comments)

Tangentially related, but I highly recommend Long Now seminars. The caliber of guests and the variety of topics are really, really good. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;longnow.org&#x2F;seminars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;longnow.org&#x2F;seminars&#x2F;</a>

My great grandfather was born in 1845. As interesting as it would be to see photos and video from his time period, I don&#x27;t think I want to spend thousands of hours going through his stuff. On the other hand if he kept a journal I would love to spend a few weeks reading about his life. I guess what I am getting at is I think we are keeping too much stuff and a curated set of things in a journal format would be a lot easier to digest. Maybe a future business will be creating documentaries from our ancestral archives.

The Long Now is one of my favorite things, are there any other organizations&#x2F;movements like it?

&gt;We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term.<p>I haven&#x27;t used a DVD in at least 5+ years, so this statement is becoming reality very quickly.

Encrypted backup to two cloud services (eg, AWS Gacier) is the best option in my view. Copy the backup software binary (that will run on any X86 hardware). Test every year. The encryption password must be written down and stored.<p>Archival at home is time consuming and expensive. If you absolutely must, consider hot storage, say, a ZFS array with ECC RAM, that runs periodic scrubs. You have to attend to the storage system, and migrate the pool every 5-10 years to new technology. It’s a pain, frankly.

Why nickel? I can&#x27;t find an explanation on this page, maybe it&#x27;s simply ease of manufacturing.<p>Iron is the most stable element, but I suppose this is mostly irrelevant at the kind of scales we are talking about.

&gt; Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone. Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years.<p>It depends. If it&#x27;s some unimportant personal data, sure. If it&#x27;s the only backup of the entire Wikipedia, I&#x27;m sure we can find a way to read it off whatever it&#x27;s on.

I like where they are going with this but I think they should have embedded it in a type of lens system where you might shine high intensity light on one side and project the micro-etchings onto another surface rather than require a microscope.

Would love to have one of these as an heirloom paperweight, but maybe once the price of production has come down a bit:<p><i>Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000</i>

Does this object also include instructions on building an microscope to read the rest of the text? Might be useful for bootstrapping a civilisation from stone age.

This is interesting, but in terms of longevity, how does it compare to carving letters one centimeter high in stone?<p>Let&#x27;s say for example, we tried doing that underground on Pluto.

Needs an 02008 tag. :)

TL;DR: &quot;well-cared for&quot;<p>Copying from one digital medium to another is a very easy operation (to the contrary of copying from paper to paper). At equal &quot;care&quot; I don&#x27;t see why digital backups should be worse than paper ones.

&gt; This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998<p>01998. Please.