Like I’d imagine there’s gonna be a lot of rain over time if I want this time capsule to last like idk 10 years? 30 years?
Is there like a box so tough its indestructible?
Can animals dig it up if I bury it?
How deep do it bury it?
Is the earth’s magnetism gonna affect the hard drive? (Or is there a better medium?)
Like I want this to be like very low budget, I don’t have millions to build an actual timecapsule like some organizations have done. Is there some cheap box that’s waterproof to protect a hard drive from damage for like 30 years buried in the ground?
They key is to diversify. Use different types of storage media, and duplicate your efforts and bury then duplicates somewhere else.
If you can choose only 1 I would choose tape archives.Vacuum seal all your media, whatever they may be. Throw in some of those dehumidifier packets. Moisture will be your biggest enemy.If possible, also add the means to be able to read your media after a long time. Add a couple of raspberry pi computers, vacuum sealed and dehumidified-by-packets again, and usb readers or HATs for the media you chose (though I doubt you will find a cheap tape drive with USB connection, the only option I found was £9000).
Over the years, as new technology gets developed, in particularly interface connectors that will replace USB, I would add converters if possible or just keep them around. Nothing suspicious about having some USB/sata/sas to <new technology> converter in your house.
Or, you know, you could always go with m-disc. Burners are cheap (40€ to 160€) and discs are cheap (4x 100GB costs 100€). For potentially 140€ you could store 400GB on a solid solution. Would still add a reader and devices as described above.
Most of those ideas are not feasible with a very low budget you want because eventually rot will get to the hard drive and thus making the contents unreadable. So – depending on what you want to preserve – it’s either writable media or printed out in acid-free paper or in microdot negative film, and of those methods, only print media – written, typed, from a copier, or with a laser printer – might as well be cheap.
Interesting thread.Would be interested to learn from commenters which storage media is most impervious to digital rot.
The standard (and tested for decades) answer is tape.
M-Disc might also be an alternative.
Tape needs to be stored in a controlled environment. Heat and humidity can degrade tapes. Usually you’d transfer the data to a new tape every 5 to 10 years just to be safe.
tnx for the reply, I suspected as much.
The issue with hard drives is that they tend to fail even on ideal conditions and even when powered down. Yes I’ve lost very important data to a powered down hard drive.
While it’s possible to recover information on a hard drive as long as the plates themselves aren’t damaged, that requires very expensive specialised tools and skills. Which probably wouldn’t be available in a scenario where the information on the drive would be of any value.
DVD-R (and probably consequentially Blu-Rays) aren’t any better in my experience, I’ve lost more data to DVD-R than to hard drives actually. Even when stored in low light conditions they tend to just stop reading.
However optical media has one big advantage here, is that the discs themselves are cheap, so instead of having all your digital eggs in the same basket, you spread them over several discs and while some information may be lost, others may survive.
Now, here’s an interesting thought, with digital data, the data either reads or doesn’t read, the so called digital cliff, may become partially corrupted and other parts still read, but after the corruption gets past a certain threshold all information is lost.
With analogue equipment even after severe signal degradation the contents while very deteriorated may still be perceptible, forwardermore an analogue signal is much easier to decode in the event that you need to restart
civilisationbuilding tech from scratch and don’t have access to the very very specific specifications of something like the audio codec or the filesystem.You can probably hack a rudimentary cassette player together from very simple components, all you need is a tape head (a coil), a motor (a coil and a magnet), and an amplifier (a transistor or vaccum tube). (I’m probably oversimplifying here).
Overall I think the most important thing is having redundancy, or if redundancy isn’t possible at least don’t have all eggs in the same basket, instead of having everything in a single 8TB HDD, to try spread them into smaller 512GB ones, or DVDs or flash drives or all of the above. And don’t store them all in the same location, if an area gets flooded or someone builds a building on top, you’re only losing a small part of the information.
I’m going to buck the trend here and suggest a really physical storage medium: Print your data out. Or laser engrave it onto sheets of metal or polymer, or whatever you want to do. If you just print pokey old black and white ones and zeros as square pixels on a sheet of 8.5x11" paper at a humble 72 DPI you can store a shade under 47 kilobytes per page without having to resort to any additional trickery. Maybe a kB or two less if you need to leave margins. How much data are you really trying to store?
In a sealed container in the dark you could easily make paper last hundreds of years (we have perfectly intact books sitting on ordinary shelves from the 1800s already), and if you wanted to print on Tyvek or something it’d probably endure thousands.
Reading this back would not be a plug-and-play solution but would have the added advantage of being a purely optical process rather than having to interface with antique storage device electronics on whatever computer you may be using 30 years from now. All you’d need is sheet feed scanner or in a pinch any sufficiently high resolution camera, and the ability to run some kind of programming environment to run a script to read those pixels back into file data.
Maybe this wouldn’t be great for archiving your collection of 4k ultra-definition porn, but it’d be absolutely sufficient for storing text and executable data for small programs, plans and schematics, other knowledgy sciency data, and even images… with the added benefit of, if any gestapo thug happens to find this early and dig it up he won’t be able to ascertain what that image is just by looking at the piece of paper.
I once heard that some printers print (almost) invisible yellow dots on pages, containing data which helps authority track down whoever printed the page. That might be a risk if the data is really sensitive.
This is true.
If you actually want to use paper… QR codes. The format is simple, broadly distributed, and has error correction built in. It’ll make the whole process a lot easier than trying to roll something yourself.
Another poster here suggested the High Capacity Color Barcode as well, which ought to already have some implementations available somewhere and sports an even higher data density if you’re willing (or able) to deal with color.
QR codes are limited to being square in aspect ratio (other than the not terribly helpful “micro rectangular QR” format) and have a maximum payload of ~3kB each. This may not be a great fit for plain consumer paper with a rectangular aspect, and you’d need to jigger some manner of batch reader so’s you don’t drive yourself insane recovering the data. Neither is an insurmountable problem; I’m just thinking out loud, here.
I’d be wary of one or more colors fading over time unless you are VERY careful with how you print these. Being monochromatic, QR codes don’t have such issues. It would likely also be easier to recover a faded QR code than a colored bar code.
Sorry if this is obvious to everyone, but how would having a hidden hard disk help with living in a dictatorship?
Couldn’t you just let someone in another country take care of archiving it?
It’s 8tb of porn and the government will be banning it, and they’re hoping it’ll pass with time like prohibition did?..
If it were me, I’d be skimming a little to sell on the side to take advantage of those black market prices.
Vintage Hulk Fucks Black Widow GIF - $500
I have a question. Is this for you in the future, or for someone who may find it? If it’s the latter, and it’s just information you want to store, not media, I’d just go with paper. Storing digital data is both hard and error prone, and it also requires them to have the technology and power to read it. If things really go to hell, this isn’t a guarantee. Paper ensures they can at least view it no matter what. It’ll degrade eventually, but it’ll hold up better than digital.
You must have an amazing porn collection. You can store it on my NAS
Ammo can with silica gel beads.
Heavily waxed and buried in a dry place, preferably somewhere where water doesn’t flow or collect.
Hard drives aren’t rated for 30 years, though. Even in optimal conditions, they’d deteriorate.
So, an atomic powered RAID array with SMART corruption correcting code attribute in a timed replacement sequence of a series of single platter, low RPM, drives, using ZFS?
But apparently, using a simple archival quality DVD+R or Blu-ray would work. (Don’t forget to include the hardware so you have something that can read it in the future.)
Apparently verbatim gold archive DVD+r has been rated for between 32 and 127 years with a minimum 18.
Some Blu-ray from a few corps is rated at 50 years.
Under ideal conditions.
However, I’ll stick to my crystal skulls and their magic alien data storage.
Also: https://github.com/usnationalarchives/digital-preservation
https://www.archives.gov/preservation/storage
Sidenote: my few Linux machines are all running on HDDs that are each at least 10 years old. With additional internal and external 5" and external 2.5" drives that are just as old. My oldest is probably about 15.
Thank the Linus for smartmontools and smartd/smartctl.
atomic powered
Brb, gonna steal the plutonium from the Libyans.
How much data do you need to store? 1.21 Gb?
Ok but now how do we keep the Bluray drive and any additional materials to make it itself compatible with future hardware it’ll have to interact with, in working order for the same timespan as the media it reads?
Archive level Blue-Rays sound interesting!
But note that any drive based solution with RAID or anything runs into the problem that the drives all age at the same time. Once one drive fails, the others are close to failing also.
Any thoughts on tape? Lto tape is designed for 10+ years
Yeah in a controlled environment. Doubt it can last the promised lifespan when it’s buried in the ground
I’d go with optical media here. Probably multiple capsules.
- M-Disk (DVD if it will fit, otherwise Blu-ray)
- Make an encrypted archive of your data. Strong password - I suggest diceware with 8 or more words so you might remember it in 30 years
- Use DVDisaster to add parity data. You sacrifice some space, but you get error tolerance in exchange
- Wrap the disks up in good jewel cases, well sealed plastic, along with some good big silica gel desiccant packs.
- Put all that in the smallest durable, airtight container you can
- stash somewhere it probably won’t be disturbed for a few decades. Memorize.
- destroy all evidence you did this.
What about tape drives? You can still get them, and I have come across articles a few times (which I can’t find on a quick search, but I only use DDG now) saying that tape drives written 30-45 years ago, carefully conserved, were still readable after all that time.
I looked into tape drives for my own backups and they don’t make sense unless you’re working with double digit terabytes. We’re talking used old enterprise gear with weird form factors and connectors, I never found something like an external USB tape drive for a reasonable price.
SCSI ain’t weird!
This is terrible advice.Most writable DVDs degrade quickly, even if they’re stored away from sunlight and heat. Every single one of my burned DVDs from more than a few years back is completely unreadable.Update: I missed the very important line about M-DISC. This is critical. I can’t vouch for M-DISC personally, but most other optical media is garbage for archival purposes.
Do you remember what kind they were? For awhile they made them with organic dyes and those died quickly. I believe they stopped producing those, and the inorganic ones are supposed to be much better.
Yes, they were organic dyes. At the time, those were the only kind. Maybe it’s gotten better over the years.
No way. Optical media suffer bitrot at a high rate compared to magnetic media. And the means to read it are quickly going obsolete.
That’s what the m-disk is for I assume.
I wouldn’t trust that either.
It’s specifically what they’re for. They’re designed for archival purposes.
You can spiral off into techno-paranoia if you like, but that’s just going to lead you to the conclusion that there are no solutions and nothing can be done. OP’s looking for actual solutions so that’s not helpful here.
I’m sorry, did I not provide a workable solution using magnetic media and periodic writes of new data? There’s nothing paranoid about that. It’s smart archiving.
You can spiral off into portraying my common-sense solution as hyperbolic bullshit, but that’s just going to lead me to the conclusion that you didn’t read or comprehend my recommendation. I provided an actual solution and what you said isn’t helpful.
That’s true, but for obvious reasons that hasn’t been fully tested yet. Still, for just 10-30 years, it should probably work. Certainly better than a hard drive.
There are ways to artificially “age” media by accelerating the sorts of degradation pathways they’d be experiencing naturally during storage in normal conditions.
M-Disks are rated for one thousand years. Unlike other writable optical meida it doesn’t use an organic substrate. It’s carbon glass, very stable.
What’s awesome is that no one alive today can disprove their marketing. I’ll stick with the tech that we’ve been using for decades. You know, the one about which we have lots of data how it performs and degrades. Because we’ve manufactured hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of them. How many people do you know using M-DISCs and how many of them have had them for decades? I can answer the second part: zero, as they came to market in 2009.
!remindme 1000 years
It’s pretty dependent on humidity and temperature, so a DVD buried in a well sealed plastic bag with a desiccant pack is actually in good conditions. No light, generally cool, and low humidity are perfect.
A hard drive has a lot of moving parts that must work and are basically impossible to replace. With optical media you’re just storing the platters, and I’m sure you’ll still be able to track down a drive somewhere. You can still find VHS players and those have been obsolete for 25 years.
Hard drives that aren’t used will get data errors over time. Usually for data storage this is counteracted with what’s called a “scrub” every so often (like few months). This just means the whole drive content is read, and the drive itself will figure out if any areas have a “weak signal”, and just rewrite that part.
Having only 1 drive without any mirror and without any way to detect potential errors (let alone a way to correct them) is a recipe for disaster.
And definitely don’t use an SSD.
proper archiving is surprisingly difficult, esp the time capsule idea. maybe this gets you started
If this is a real problem you have, and not just a thought experiment, I think rather than burying the data on some unreliable medium, your best bet is to just pay someone to store it for you offshore, away from the dictatorship you mentioned.
There are plenty of consumer-grade cloud storage services. I’m sure there are more niche ones specifically for long-term archival as well, which would usually be cheaper per bit, per-year, if you don’t need to access the data regularly.
Would you have to worry about the records of your ongoing business with these data storage providers though?
