19 ms·

Ask HN: What's the most stable form of digital storage?

• captainbland 5y ago
  Maybe archival DVDs? They sound good on paper and some of them show promising marketing test data but does anyone have any information on whether these products are likely to be any good for long term retention with infrequent reads?
• smoldesu 5y ago
  > What's a good storage medium where I can keep and load again in the future? USB flash? HDD? SSD? > must keep for at least 3 decades Most storage mediums won't have problems lasting that long if they're stored well. Particularly flash and SSD storage shouldn't take issue: tape and HDD has a small chance of mechanical failure even if you don't use them. > must be easily transportable (for moves between houses and such) and can sit on a shelf I mean, I think most of our current formats do just fine in that regard. > Bonus points for suggestions on an equally stable storage type that some computer will still be able to understand in the future. Almost everyone is still using SATA. There is unlikely to be a world in the future that is unable to "understand" serial ATA storage.
  • wmf 5y ago
    An IDE or SCSI hard disk from 1992 would technically be easily accessible using adapters but mechanically it probably wouldn't spin up. Removable storage from that era like magneto-optical or SyQuest would require a rare and very obsolete drive that may also have mechanical problems. I expect similar problems looking forward. Hard disks made today aren't rated for 30 years, NAND flash retention is much less than 30 years, and Blu-ray drives may be hard to find.
    • a9h74j 5y ago
      > NAND flash retention is much less than 30 years Hard failures aside, I assume very slow charge decay might be somewhat mitigated by periodically copying files flash-to-same-flash (let alone another) -- or perhaps even rewriting them in place.
      • willis936 5y ago
        Honestly the best answer is to this question is one that requires more effort than "burn once, sit on shelf". The best answer is "host a NAS that you actively maintain and has an offsite mirror". I personally host an all-flash NAS for the performance and MTTF benefits over HDD. Since it's always on and performs regular scrubs there is no concern of bit-rot. The data I put there will be there as long as I'm around to take care of the box and pay the B2 bill.
      • daviddever23box 5y ago
        This is ultimately the best option - checksummed in-flight data has a higher likelihood of being verified at both read-source and write-drain endpoints. That said - I'm at a loss to understand what software is ultimately worth using without modification after 30y....
        • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
          > I'm at a loss to understand what software is ultimately worth using without modification after 30y I wrote a video game for my child’s birthday. Does that count?
          • RonaldOlzheim 5y ago
            (I wrote a video game for my child’s birthday. Does that count?) For your child 100% so if that´s the goal why not? Modification is a big word. Old cars can still be valueble in capital and make you feel much more alive then a brand new car.
    • don-code 5y ago
  • BackBlast 5y ago
    >> must keep for at least 3 decades > Most storage mediums won't have problems lasting that long if they're stored well. Particularly flash and SSD storage shouldn't take issue: tape and HDD has a small chance of mechanical failure even if you don't use them. I think you're overstating the durability of these systems. I saved most every HDD I've used dating back to the early 90s. I wanted to get rid of the box of drives, so I got an adapter and tried to see what I could salvage from them before throwing them out. Ages varied from about 8 to 28 years. None of the ancient drives (>15 years) worked. I could usually hear them spin up, but I couldn't get anything off them. Several had the dreaded click of death present. I got some of the newer (<12 year old drives) to work. Even the newer 8 year old drives had really high failure rates. They were all working when I pull them out of service. My old USB flash drives have also had high failure rates for me. From my experience, expecting an HDD that isn't in use, to go for more than ~5 years totally idle is asking to lose the data on it. The data might still technically be there, but the mechanical+electrical system that makes up an HDD does not have high longevity. To the original question. I actually just researched this topic extensively to make purchases for my back up systems and my conclusion is: If I really want data to go 30+ years. I'm using archive grade Blu-ray discs (M-disc and LTH). I burn multiple of the data I want, and I store them in dark places at separate locations.
  • hedora 5y ago
    Flash is a terrible idea. NAND cells are basically little capacitors, and they leak electrons over time. Current TLC drives actually rewrite themselves every month or so to keep read error rates low. If you leave them unplugged, they can't do that. If you must use flash, keep it cool. We have some deer cameras in direct sunlight. After six months or so, the SD cards become unmountable due to media read errors.
• john_the_writer 5y ago
  Burned CD. When I got married (20+ years ago) I burned a CD full of music for the DJ. Songs that were not likely in his/her collection. I found the CD in a box about a year ago, and it is currently in my car stereo. All the songs are in tact. Oh.. My xbox also reads and plays the music.
  • btrettel 5y ago
    This recent HN discussion has a lot of information about the reliability of optical discs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30888906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30888906 My main comment has some hard numbers based on my own experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30889474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30889474 In short: 77% of the discs I ripped after ~15-18 years had minor issues as demonstrated through read errors (when ripping with ddrescue) and checksums (in png, zip, and gz files; I did not manually checksum files back in the day). I was able to rip 99.88% on the worst disk, and I estimate that about 97% of the files are intact on that disk. CDs and optical discs more broadly seem to be reasonable, but I'm not really sure they'll be in good shape after 30 years. I'd consider them part of a backup strategy, not an entire backup strategy. I personally use a combination of external (magnetic) hard drives, flash drives, and optical discs for backups. Replacing the optical discs after 10 years or so seems prudent, as is redundancy and/or par2 files.
    • fredophile 5y ago
      CDs and DVDs are cheap and burning them is fast and easy. Make several copies, calculate the checksum, and store them in different places. Every few years see how badly they've degraded and after hitting some pre chosen threshold you can return all of them. If their data really is less than 1 GB they could even store 4-5 copies per DVD for additional redundancy. Even on a single disk I'd imagine the errors are unlikely to be in the same region on all 4 copies.
      • vikingerik 5y ago
        Optical media doesn't hold enough, though. I've got a terabyte of downloaded media. Even with Blu-rays that hold 50 GB, I'm not going to bother burning and storing and keeping 40 of them. I go with simple external hard drives. I get a new one every couple years and copy everything to it as my main backup. The likelihood of my in-machine drive and fairly young backup drive failing at the same time is pretty low. Even if that happens, the previous backup drive will have a good portion of it. And my important docs folder also goes to Carbonite online backup.
• wmf 5y ago
  Microsoft glass storage is probably close to the best but not commercially available: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil... 35 mm film is also interesting but probably costs a fortune: https://www.piql.com/services/long-term-data-storage/ https://www.piql.com/services/long-term-data-storage/
  • the_only_law 5y ago
    Ah damn that glass thing actually seems really cool. I’ll have to look and see if there’s much info out there about it right now. Ive heard a little bit about very fast lasers (link mentions femtosecond lasers) and was curious what all sort of non-academic uses they see.
  • Mindwipe 5y ago
    This is definitely the correct answer - the glass project is really good, and having spoken to people working on it they are absolutely the closest to nailing this. It is close too, at least to a wider rollout.
• moistly 5y ago
  Paper? https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper I mostly jest. It would require a lot of paper. But it should be stable storage for potentially centuries.
• bombcar 5y ago
  Multiple methods would be most reliable as it spreads it out amongst various ones. For a single copy long term paper or etched metal is probably the most reliable. Now what is the most density you can get on standard paper? That’s a more interesting question. Probably some collection of QR coded, multiple copies maybe. Real talk: every 6 mos when checking fire alarm batteries check your storage (and as necessary migrate it to copies on new cloud systems etc). I wonder if printing microfiche is something you can find easily.
• sumthinprofound 5y ago
  I don't trust any consumer storage medium to last 30 years, but the good news is I have had much success keeping document archives accessible for roughly a decade, then transferring the content to current technology. From floppy to mechanical hdd to cd-r to now ssd. Maybe consider something shorter term than 30 years, but with an upgrade path.
  • tkgally 5y ago
    I’ve been doing something similar. After losing some important personal files back in the early 1990s due to floppies that failed, and hearing a lot of stories then about people losing data in hard disk crashes, I got paranoid about my personal archives and started backing them all up systematically and redundantly to the latest media (CD-R, DVD-R, etc.). My strategy changed, though, with the arrival of cloud storage. Now I have all of my files—about a terabyte and a half—synced to multiple computers through Dropbox, and I back up each of those computers to an offline hard disk every ten days or so. My main computer is also backed up continuously to an external hard disk. File formats are a different problem. Until around the end of the 1990s, I used a series of different word processor, spreadsheet, page layout, email, and other programs, all for the Macintosh, and I can no longer open a lot of those files. In more recent years, file formats seem to have become more stable, and I have tried to be careful to use formats that seem likely to survive as long as I will—docx, odt, mp3, pdf, jpeg, and especially txt.
    • sumthinprofound 5y ago
      This sounds like a solid strategy. Most of my oldest documents were Wordperfect 5, so they were still readable. I have converted them to txt (accessibilty) and pdf (preserve formatting). My biggest miscalculations were using CD-RW media during a period of time in the early 2000s (the media often cannot be read by CD drives the disc was not created on) as well as my choice to use cheap CD-R media which over time the plastic became cloudy, or the reflective layer oxidizing and then flaking over time.
• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Any medium that is stable physically for at least a few decades and can be read optically. Acid free paper with the data machine encoded, laser etched metal, etc. Anything traditional would need to be online (HDD), easily reread and verified over time (tape), or is not recommended (SSD). It costs the Internet Archive $2/GB to store content in perpetuity, maybe create an account, upload your code as an item, donate $5 to them, and call it a day. Digitally sign the uploaded objects so you can prove provenance in the future (if you so desire); you could also sign your git commits with GPG and bundle the git repo up as a zip for upload. EDIT: @JZL003 The Internet Archive has their own storage system. I would assume it caps out because they're operating under Moore's Law assumption that cost of storage will continue to decrease into the future (and most of their other costs are fixed). Of course, don't abuse the privilege. There are real costs behind the upload requests, and donating is cheap and frictionless. https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ > What are your fees? > At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs. > How long will you store files? > As an archive our intention is to store and make materials in perpetuity. https://archive.org/web/petabox.php https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
  • JZL003 5y ago
    Where did you get that number, out of curiosity. Google's cloud storage is 2 cents per gb per month and backblaze b2 is $0.005 p/ gb per month. I understand in perpetuity is more expensive but why does it cap out as opposed to being a yearly price per gb (maybe if you assume hard drive storage will decrease at a similar rate?) Quick envelope math, if they were using backblaze pricing, $5 would give a gb 83 years of storage. But it's unclear if backblaze is actually regionally duplicated
    • tarboreus 5y ago
      83 years != perpetuity, hosted != archived.
    • lostmsu 5y ago
• philistine 5y ago
  Tape storage? https://www.ibm.com/storage/tape https://www.ibm.com/storage/tape
  • l33tbro 5y ago
    Tape is still what many use to archive project files and the daily rushes for feature films. Certainly more robust than the multiple drives that get used in post.
    • _tom_ 5y ago
      Tape suffers from hardware progress. It gets harder and harder to find hardware to read a given tape format. The market for tape is much smaller than consumer markets (in units sold) You'll probably be able to read CDs in fifty years, just because there are so many of them. If you have a fifty year old tape, even in perfect condition, you probably won't be able find hardware to read it.
      • protomyth 5y ago
        LTO is pretty simple in read two generations back. Migration is pretty straight forward. If you have a fifty year old tape, even in perfect condition, you probably won't be able find hardware to read it. As I found out when migrating a pre-LTO AS/400 tape, there are rental places known to IBM partners that rent the drives that can hook to modern equipment.
        • _tom_ 5y ago
          If you know where I can get a qic tape drive, I'd really like to know !
          • protomyth 5y ago
            What do you need to hook it up to?
• profquail 5y ago
  M-DISC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC They’re special DVD and Blu-ray discs designed for long-term storage. DVD and Blu-ray are so widely used, it seems likely you’d be able to find some equipment in 30 years that could still read them.
  • cdubzzz 5y ago
    Do you really think physical disc and media players for them will last long? I still cling to an old blu-ray player but every time I buy some discs it feels like I’m sifting through the ruins of a collapsed building (in some giant bin in the middle of a large retailer hallway). I also feel like I never see a single other person looking at or purchasing discs…
    • NateEag 5y ago
      The research suggests that M-DISC Blu-Rays should be fairly durable if not handled often. I think the disc players are the weak link. I can definitely imagine them going away nigh-entirely in a decade or three.
    • webmaven 5y ago
      > Do you really think physical disc and media players for them will last long? Yes. There are too many use cases for physical and immutable long-term offline storage for this niche to go unfilled, but the niche is too small (at present) to prompt the development of a replacement medium and format, so while I am sure that the materials and read/write hardware will continue to evolve (better data longevity guarantees, read/write speed, physical durability, etc.) the implementations will remain compatible, or at least the reading ones will.
  • xupybd 5y ago
    I didn't manage to find anywhere to buy these in my country. They could be tricky to get.
• hirundo 5y ago
  "The most durable digital storage medium is stable at room temperature for 300 quintillion years, a material created by researchers from the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, as published on 23 January 2014. "The material, a nanostructured glass disc, also has an estimated lifetime of 13.8 billion years (roughly the current age of the universe) at elevated temperature of 462 K (190 C), and a capacity of 360 TB. It has been hailed as a particularly significant invention, as no other existing storage medium can so safely ensure that data will be accessible by future generations." https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/412399-most-durable-digital-storage-medium https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/412399-mo...
  • i_like_waiting 5y ago
    definitely more durable than link you provided
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Visited the British Library Archive some years ago and asked the same question, they said - removable hard drives, stored horizontally in a climate controlled room. Apprently that's the best price point for density, MTBF for mechanical or chemical (temperature related) degradation.
  • hedora 5y ago
    Did they say how often they scrub / replace the drives?
    • nonrandomstring 5y ago
      I got the impression it was a "keep forever" policy.
• osigurdson 5y ago
  Suggest Arweave. https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/
• hiyer 5y ago
  You could upload it to some cloud storage like aws s3 (infrequent access tier) or cloudflare r2. For a GB of storage it will cost you around 1.25-1.5 cents a month. AWS will cost you 9c every time you download it, cloudflare will cost nothing.
  • krasin 5y ago
    And one day a random bot decides to ban your account and everything is gone.
    • aborsy 5y ago
      You copy to Google and Dropbox as well.
      • krasin 5y ago
        That assumes that the policies of these companies don't change suddenly to ban all of the associated accounts in unison.
• pmlnr 5y ago
  HTL BluRay (the expensive ones) are quite good, Panasonic used to sell archival version of them they advertised for 50 years.
• hedora 5y ago
  These have worked OK for 4000+ years. There's a collection in San Jose: https://egyptianmuseum.catalogaccess.com/search?search=contract+tablet&page=1&size=10&withImages=false https://egyptianmuseum.catalogaccess.com/search?search=contr... Though some are the only remaining replicas from RAID-1 (RAIT?) groups. Consider adding LDPC or something while you're at it.
  • hedora 5y ago
    I try not to reply to myself, but here's an interactive 3D scan of a 4770 year old homework assignment on a clay tablet: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ancient-mesopotamian-stars-planets-tablet-4e27f4de386647cd9aa8da13b85bfcf5 https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ancient-mesopotamian-stars-p... The cost per bit of this data is mind boggling at this point.
• Apreche 5y ago
  Perhaps HD-Rosetta? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta
• paulpauper 5y ago
  publish it to a blockchain
• javajosh 5y ago
  If it's just for posterity, then consider printing it out as a poster. Because it's "art" its less likely to be lost, too. For extra credit, scan it back in and run it, at least once. I'd wager you'd learn a lot doing that.
• cdumler 5y ago
  There isn't. Sorry, but there just isn't a permanent format. The real problem isn't the storage media but that technological standards evolve. Tape media is excellent at surviving. I have a 9 track digital tape keepsake from when I used to work with it regularly some 20 years ago. I'm absolutely certain that the data on it is still good. I don't have the 300-pound "dishwasher" drive that can read it, the three-phase power to run it, nor a DEC Vax that understands EBCDIC encoding. The only true solution is a living one, where you have make sure you have the ability to get your data from an old format to a new one periodically. More importantly, you should look into the idea of 3-2-1 Backups. Anything that you intend to keep indefinitely is subject random events, ie fire, flood, tornado, theft, etc. Having multiple archives in separate systems is more import than worrying trying to ensure a single copy will last a long time. Storing less than a gigabyte is very cheap to do in multiple formats, such as USB flash drive, external hard drive, CD, BlueRay disc, etc. You can hedge against data corruption with PAR2 files. Also, consider storing a copy on the cloud, ie Backblack B2, AS S3, etc. Again, I suggest creating PAR2 files and/or using an archive format that can resist damage. Just create calendar events to check periodically the integrity of your archives. Having problems reading a CD, use the hard drive backup to burn a new one. This also a good time to consider if one or more your formats is no longer viable. Finally, realize that a program runs within an environment and those get replaced over time. You need to no only back up your program, but probably want to store the operating system and tools around it.
  • dotancohen 5y ago
    > You can hedge against data corruption with PAR2 files. This is the key phrase from the entire thread. PAR2 will enable the user to create recovery files, if (actually, when) part of the original data will be corrupted. The recovery files (by default 5% the size of the original files) should be stored alongside the original files in each location.
  • usr1106 5y ago
    DEC VAXes have never used EBCDIC. At least not natively. Probably they could convert from/into it, but the Unix/Linux program dd on my Raspberry Pi can do that, too. Coding is not the problem, the hardware is.
• yuppie_scum 5y ago
  Just put a copy in S3 Glacier and maybe the equivalents from Azure and GCP. It’s ludicrously cheap, on the order of cents per gb per month.
• manicdee 5y ago
  The best place to archive it is your current computer which you use every day, ideally with a VM of the machine that can run that code (maybe Open Virtualisation Format can keep it useable longer?). Then hope that when you want to use that program again in the future the VM will still boot on whatever host you have available. Then come back to it at least once a year to run it again and make sure it still works. At present we are lucky enough that Windows programs from 1990s still run under Windows 10 to some degree. Thank the folks at Microsoft for maintaining their operating system as a digital museum of archaic bug-compatible APIs. Something to keep on the shelf would mean you ignore it for too long and it stops working. Even something like a Python script may stop working due to changes in the language, and old versions of the interpreter no longer being maintained.
• kabdib 5y ago
  I have often wondered if baked clay tablets are the most cost-effective, durable medium we've invented, in dollars per bit-year. Yeah, you can do archival diamond, or archival ink on archival paper. But will you be able to read it 1,000 years hence? I doubt there's a market for a printer, except as a novelty device. I wonder what kind of bit density you can achieve, in clay?
  • zmgsabst 5y ago
    We have parchments with inks that are thousands of years old. That said, etched metal or ceramic would likely be better. A CNC with a dremel would would let you digitally generate your tablets at ~$200 + tablet materials. Cheap ceramic tiles are $0.50-$1 per sq ft.
    • CSSer 5y ago
      It seems like at a certain point it's the environment, not the material used, that is the most important factor.
• zoomablemind 5y ago
  This sounds more like a riddle... But at the face value, it's hard not to wonder whether you'd like to preserve a functional program, or its source code, or its architectural and design ideas? Either way, your current perception of the program is likely tied to the current technology or perhaps even whole ecosystem around it. So to preserve something like that, you'd need more than just storage. If it's just for the source code, as in text, then as golden rule of backup goes - keep many copies in distributed but known locations. In other words - diversify and distribute. Whatever storage digital, or analog, or organic, as in human memory (storytelling is a type of storage too). Though, likely, you mean the functional program. Thus you'd need to preserve the platform too, along with build tools. So, at least some system specs need to be preserved or a VM image for more or less stable virtualization envs.
  • strogonoff 5y ago
    The understanding of the original real-world problem, the very idea of a solution, and the language-agnostic mapping of that solution to program architecture (making good use of existing patterns and algorithms[0]) is the genius, the core value of high-level programmer’s work. These ideas, as well as the appropriate external context, can be captured using any medium, be it analog or digital, since no one came up with a better way to convey it than text and possibly some diagrams. It is part of the reason I consider well-written and well-structured high-level documentation more critical than tests or even functioning program itself. The latter are lossy, narrower representations. [0] If there is anything novel as far as specific patterns and algorithms involved, they can be appropriately formalized and documented in isolation of the larger program and also in a language-agnostic way.
  • trop 5y ago
    Indeed, there's an argument that the culture around anything (including software) is the main thing. And if the culture thrives, then that becomes the stable backup (or rather stable living vessel). Isn't there a Linus Torvalds quote that he has the world's largest distributed backup system for his code? But the point isn't that he bamboozled people into keeping copies of the Linux source everywhere -- it's that he started and oversees a living and helpful project. I had a teacher who was known as a master printer. Students would ask, "How can I make a truly archival print?" His answer: "Show me something you make worth keeping, and I'll tell you."
• spoonjim 5y ago
  If just the source code: print it out on acid-free paper and put it in a safe deposit box.
• fulafel 5y ago
  Stone tablets are the gold standard in the most stable storage dept. They can support arbitrary information encodings including text and binary and satisfy the < 1 GB, > 30 years criteria.
  • kqr 5y ago
    Pencil on quality paper is another good one. The main difference being, of course, that one lasts millennia and the other centuries.
  • manachar 5y ago
    Baked clay is likely superior. Ceramics have fewer impurities that stone has that would cause data loss from standard things like erosion. Much of the oldest preserved writing is preserved on ceramics. For another expensive approach, I suspect gold, like the gold voyager record would surpass it. I imagine you could encode a lot of data in something like a QR code stamped in clay.
    • prox 5y ago
      Microfiches would be a great more practical alternative I think :)
    • fulafel 5y ago
      The oldest surviving tablets are stone tablets, so as a stone tablet marketing guy I'll have to say that clay is still relatively unproven technology. (A more hasty experimentalist might conclude that it is proven - to be less durable than stone)
      • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
        As a titanium engraving marketing guy, I'd argue that my technology is younger and even less proven than ceramics, but I'm going to bet it's more durable than engraving in stone.
        • tiborsaas 5y ago
• bagels 5y ago
  Stainless steel punchcards
• gossamer 5y ago
  Wherever you store this program, I think you should store all the comments attached to this post as well. I bet it will be pretty interesting reading in 30 years.
• stenl 5y ago
  DNA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage It will last 10k years if stored reasonably. Storing GBs is no problem. Won’t go obsolete - the technology has been around for nearly four billion years.
  • KronisLV 5y ago
    > It will last 10k years if stored reasonably. I've heard people bring up the half-life of DNA in topics of longevity (e.g. why it'd be problematic even if we'd solve many other problems), which is apparently around 500 or so years? https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-life-dna/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-li... Wouldn't you also have to contest such eventual decay, unless you'd pick some very stable materials? Though the page you linked has "in vivo" as a separate category (only one of approaches), so maybe this is not as applicable with the alternative methods.
    • pcrh 5y ago
      500 years refers to the chemical stability of DNA exposed to the environment. Under protected conditions it would last longer, and if inserted into a living genome, it could be replicated each generation and readable hundreds of thousands of years later.
  • sph 5y ago
    I don't think it fares very well against any kind of radiation.
    • teknopaul 5y ago
      There is a good cyberpunk shortstory here with biotek graffiti artists releasing a virus in the underground with I_WAS_HERE encoded in it. Perhaps with a variant released as a cure for the ensuing pandemic that is eventually discovered to have HERE_I_WAS encoded in it too.
• mzur 5y ago
  Others have mentioned the Internet Archive. There is also Zenodo [1] where you can archive code and have a good chance that it survives long-term. Zenodo is run by CERN and even has an integration with GitHub, so you can easily archive GitHub repositories. Each archived item can get a Digital Object Itentifier with you could etch into glass to put on your shelf (so you can find your stuff again in a few decades). [1] https://zenodo.org https://zenodo.org
• beagle3 5y ago
  This is very relevant, and perhaps deserves a submission of its own: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2534391.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2534391.stm """But the snapshot of in the UK in the mid-1980s was stored on two virtually indestructible interactive video discs which could not be read by today's computers. """ I can't find the back story now, but if they weren't able to source a working laser disk reader from a member of the public (which IIRC took quite a bit of effort to find), then accessing this data - digitized in the early 1980s - would have cost a fortune. The inspiration for this project, the 900-year-old Domesday Book, is just as readable today as it was in 1980 (and in 1200 or so). The ability to read data with one's eyes should not be underestimated.
  • leokennis 5y ago
    Remark on the side: This entire page is about 122 kB, is clearly laid out and easy to read. If I check a similar short-ish news item today (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61185298 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61185298) my browser (with ad blocker) needs to load 3.8 MB of data (31 times as much) and I can see less of the actual content. Instead of Web3, can we maybe go back to Web1?
    • maxwelldone 5y ago
      To add on to your observation, reading mode is even better to look at and loads just shy of 16KB. As an aside, I still don't understand what Web3 aims to solve but I feel Web 2 is good enough if people don't go crazy with js, images, ads and other shenanigans.
• jjav 5y ago
  If the question is literally about just one program source code, the answer is easy: print it out. All my oldest preserved code (early 80s) is on paper, the things it occurred to me at the time to print out. No fancy archival paper either, just listings printed out on my dot matrix printer onto fanfold printer paper. Anything from that era that I didn't print out is gone. From the late 80s onward I still have all the files that I've cared to save. The general answer to that is that there is no persistent medium, you need to commit to keep migrating that data forward to whatever makes sense every so often. I copied my late 80s 5.25" floppies to 1.44MB floppies in the early 90s. In the mid 90s I copied anything accumulated to CD-Rs. In the 2000s I started moving everything to DVD-Rs. From the late 2000s until today I have everything (going back to those late 80s files) on a ZFS pool with 4-way mirroring. Of course, aside from preserving the bits you also need to be able to read them in a future. Avoid all proprietary formats, those will be hopeless. Prefer text above all else, that will always be easily readable. For content where text is impossible, only use open formats which have as many independent open source implementations as possible to maximize your chances of finding or being able to port code that can still read the file 30-40 years from now. But mostly just stick with plain text.
  • rdlw 5y ago
    Here's another benefit to printing: once a decade, when you migrate storage boxes or move houses, what are the odds you'll look at your printouts and reminisce? Probably pretty good, since it's easy to look at something. Meanwhile, personally, I back up old data but hardly ever look at it, since it's mixed in with old programs that probably won't work and a thousand photos I don't want to see. So maybe laser-etched platinum will last longer, but the barrier to reading it will certainly be higher.
  • adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    But do use some kind archival-grade paper. The £2 per ream supermarket crap that curls up in hot weather is probably full of acid and will become brittle and fall apart eventually. And I would check if there are issues with either cheap ink fading or cheap toner flaking off on the multi-decade timescale. Though you will probably appreciate a decent printer anyway to chug through 1GB of text!
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  If you want to keep it secure for at least three decades you should follow the principle of Lockss https://www.lockss.org/ https://www.lockss.org/ "Lots of copies keeps stuff safe". You might like to read through the site, but if not then I would suggest keeping it safe via storage in multiple formats and locations. If I really wanted to keep something safe and wanted to put effort into it I would put it on a remote service, an external physical media that I might store somewhere else safe, and whenever I get a new computer it would get backed up to my computer. This of course puts extra managerial requirements on you, which for me would be difficult because of the ADHD problems, but of course you would need to make sure to keep your remote service or make sure if you are getting rid of it that you have a plan for moving stuff etc. In my case I have multiple computers so I would also make sure important to preserve stuff was backed up to all of them. All of which reminds me I should update a bunch of my stuff.
  • jzer0cool 5y ago
    Is this something to store on their site? I see it is open source but didn't see any examples of a running site - anyone come across an ide just to explore some feature sets here?
• blenderdt 5y ago
  It's not only storage. I think most will be fine after 30 years. The problem is often: how are you going to read it after all those years? I got floppy disks that are ~25 years old. But without an old USB disk drive there is no way to know if they still are readable. And if USB-C becomes the norm I am not sure if I can read them ever again.
  • superdisk 5y ago
    You can get an adapter from USB-C to USB-A.
• adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Only 3 decades puts an LTO tape firmly in play. But the drive is pricy if you buy new. They're used so much by huge businesses[1], those archives will still be on tape in 30 years. The tar format (tape archive) likewise will still be around. Probably the biggest worry would be the interface connector, but considering you can buy serial adapters, and RS-232 is over 60 years old, you'll be able to get a USB adapter for whatever ports we have in 30 years. The standard archive mechanism for the film industry when committing a film's footage to The Vault, is LTO and hard drive. Good enough for Disney is good enough for me. If a cataclysmic change happens in storage media enough to unseat billions upon billions of LTO tapes, there'll be plenty of warning as the whole world changes over. And you'll be able to pick up spare drives for a pittance. [1]: Shipping over 100 exabytes per year. This is slightly less than what just Seagate shipped in HDD capacity, but every byte of LTO storage is both with long term retention in mind.
  • KronisLV 5y ago
    > But the drive is pricy if you buy new. They seem insanely expensive for what they are! The tapes themselves are cheaper than regular HDDs, which is nice. But when you look at the drives, what's basically a box for recording data on the tape costs thousands of dollars! A single drive like that would be more expensive than my entire computer! Why is the pricing like that? Is it because overpricing things for enterprises is okay in the minds of the manufacturers? Low supply? Various certification requirements? How come there are no cheaper compatible drive alternatives and everyone must therefore go for the used market? Actually, why haven't most people even heard of tape drives and backups that way - is it because of the pricing that this never got big or even the fact that not many consider doing backups all that well?
    • smackeyacky 5y ago
      Older people who have been IT professionals are familiar with tape. LTO2 drives are pretty cheap and you can buy new tapes. I got mine inside a second hand server I bought, its my go to "last resort" back up mechanism.
• lizardactivist 5y ago
  Quality consumer media in a current format, store three copies each in two locations. Evaluate integrity of the data each year to delay bit-rot and make new copies as needed, and decide if the format is beginning to disappear and it's time to create six new copies in a modern format. It's cheaper and easier than finding media that you can literally forget about for decades and still find intact, and easily recoverable.
  • KronisLV 5y ago
    > ...store three copies each in two locations. > ...decide if the format is beginning to disappear and it's time to create six new copies in a modern format. This is funny to me because you might end up with way too many copies to manage. But the advice about formats and the backups needing to be "alive" is good, even if nobody might want to hear that due to it needing procedures built around it. Most people would simply want to make backups and have them sit somewhere for decades, which sadly isn't as reliable of an approach.
    • lizardactivist 5y ago
      Two copies could be enough if the filing system has mechanisms for verifying file integrity, so never more than four copies in total - no point accumulating them. It's possible flash-based media could be left unused for two to three years before needing to be powered up, but I think this time-span gets shorter as the storage density increases.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  In terms of permanent without need to interact, it's pretty hard. But with minimal effort you can do it. Keep the stuff in text and move it around to different places periodically, and keep redundant copies. At the moment I favour git. It's easy to set up multiple repos, and if one goes offline you can set up another.
• jrapdx3 5y ago
  I've thought about this a lot. It's becoming a serious issue for museums since increasingly contemporary artwork incorporates digital processes, for example video and photographs. Archivists worry about stability of storage media as well as long-term usability of CDROM, DVD, magnetic drives, SSDs, etc. The ability (or lack of it) to play/view an original archive is already a major problem. Think about the history of floppy disks, zip media, digital tape cartridges, and numerous others. I recall these media being quite prevalent back in the 90's, and that's only <=30 years ago. (I have my own share of them.) Today these media are ancient history and soon, if not already, as inscrutable as the writing systems of obscure prehistoric civilizations. As said in several comments, the situation is worse for software. Keeping long superseded equipment running is very difficult. (I have some of that too.) Preserving source code should be pretty straightforward, printed out with archival ink on 100% cotton fiber, acid-free and buffered paper would work. The only catch is long-term storage of the printed document. Paper itself is subject to environmental degradation. Museum standards specify constant 20&deg;C, 50% humidity, sealed against atmospheric pollutants and no light exposure. That should hold it for at least 100 years. :-) Technologies are great, seems a good bet that a brilliant startup will think of new ways to preserve the history of our epoch.
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  Hands down best method is to print it out. This provides the advantage of being able to yak shave your own typesetting pipeline / make your own paper / build your own press / design your own paper based data encoding that’s better than anything we’ve seen before.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  Getting it to appear somewhere in archive.org certainly can't hurt as long as it's not something private
• throwaway290 5y ago
  Make your program so good or impactful that it is in high demand and/or goes viral (or make it part of something that does), let the Internet handle redundancy and preservation for you.
  • culturedsystems 5y ago
    AKA the Torvalds backup system https://lkml.org/lkml/1996/7/22/8 https://lkml.org/lkml/1996/7/22/8
• just-tom 5y ago
  Perhaps I simplified your question, but for me, every important digital "thing" I have is stored in my paid Dropbox account (2TB). I believe that as a rule of thumb, private tech companies invent and upgrade new technologies to make their product better, and a company like Dropbox is surely thinking of this. In my Dropbox account, I have EXE files of small programs I wrote in Visual Basic 20 years ago, and they still work after being stored there for at least 12 years. Good luck.
  • dolmen 5y ago
    But "private tech companies" do not provide process to keep our data alive beyond their owner. Data will disappear if you stop paying. You might stop paying because you are dead, but also because you have health issues.
• verisimi 5y ago
  yes... well, your code is the least of your worries, I'd say. Keeping the same environment around for decades will be far harder!
• trapatsas 5y ago
  I’m surprised so many people suggest magnetic media for long term storage. They are extremely likely to be damaged at any point and from several sources and in the very long term they are guaranteed to fail due to cosmic radiation.
• dataking 5y ago
  Putting your code on GitHub and meeting the requirements to inclusion in their Arctic Vault would put it on storage designed to last 1000 years at least [0]. They use film reels for storage [1]. Then again, retrieval is not super easy ;-) [0] https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ [1] https://www.piql.com/ https://www.piql.com/
  • hulitu 5y ago
    Until one day you realize that you have the wrong name or you live in the wrong country and all your data is gone.
• melbourne_mat 5y ago
  Gdrive
  • teknopaul 5y ago
    In approx 30 yrs time you might be able to get the data back on Linux.
• vbezhenar 5y ago
  M-Disc
• mihvoi 5y ago
  Make multiple copies in various places, including read-only like CD/DVD. Re-copy at regular intervals. Do not underestimate the resilience of paper format, however it's harder to move it to digital again. More ideas that you could also use for programs: https://meaningofstuff.blogspot.com/2015/05/backup-your-smartphone-pictures-for-20.html https://meaningofstuff.blogspot.com/2015/05/backup-your-smar...
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > however it's harder to move it to digital again. Should be fairly easy if you print bar codes, qr codes, etc. We used to have programs distributed on paper with a simple hand held bar code reader. With modern printers and error correction this should be extremely robust. You could just take a phone cam picture.
• peterburkimsher 5y ago
  3 decades is short enough to be "living memory", so no need for cuneiform tablets ;-) My dad's Ph.D. is on PDP-8 magnetic tape. We went to a computer museum to try to recover it, but their PDP-11's Winchester drive (hard drive) had broken (and made dramatic noises), so we weren't able to boot fully in order to mount the tape. Eventually we ran out of time. Over 30 years, the best way would be to teach someone new. Especially a child. Educational computing is how Apple built their market, and how the Raspberry Pi is gently gaining market adoption for Linux. There's some LOGO code from 1997 that I wrote on a Mac Plus (and copied forwards repeatedly) at age 7, that still runs on Mini vMac. The challenge is in finding someone else who believes in your posterity just as much as you. And that's just one challenge of having kids. (thankfully I'm yet to experience that responsibility).
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  "Hashes + Copies + Distribution" I used to work in the data protection industry, doing backup software integration. Customers would ask me stupid questions like "what digital tape will last 99 years?" They have a valid business need, and the question isn't even entirely stupid, but it's Wrong with a capital W. The entire point of digital information vs analog is the ability to create lossless copies ad infinitum. This frees up the need to reduce noise, increase fidelity, and rely on "expensive media" such as archival-grade paper, positive transparency slides, or whatever. You can keep digital data forever using media that last just a few years. All you have to do is embrace its nature, and utilise this benefit. 1. Take a cryptographic hash of the content. This is essential to verify good copies vs corrupt copies later, especially for low bit-error-rates that might accumulate over time. Merkle trees are ideal, as used in BitTorrent. In fact, that is the best approach: create torrent files of your data and keep them as a side-car. 2. Every few years, copy the data to new, fresh media. Verify using the checksums created above. Because of the exponentially increasing storage density of digital media, all of your "old stuff" combined will sit in a corner of your new copy, leaving plenty of space for the "new stuff". This is actually better than accumulating tons of low-density storage such as ancient tape formats. This also ensures that you're keeping your data on media that can be read on "current-gen" gear. 2. Distribute at least three copies to at least three physical locations. This is what S3 and similar blob stores do. Two copies/locations might sound enough, but temporary failures are expected over a long enough time period, leaving you in the expected scenario of "no redundancy". ... or just pay Amazon to do it and dump everything into an S3 bucket?
  • michaelt 5y ago
    S3 eliminates the risk of a disk becoming unreadable, or losing data in a fire. And it's overwhelmingly likely S3 will still exist in an easily readable form in 30 years time. But it doesn't provide protection against you forgetting to pay AWS, you losing your credentials, your account getting hacked, or your account getting locked by some overzealous automation.
    • wildmanxx 5y ago
      > And it's overwhelmingly likely S3 will still exist in an easily readable form in 30 years time. There is no indication that this statement holds true. Not even remotely. Businesses fold all the time. How many services still exist today that existed 30 years ago? Not in some archive, but still operational? In addition to that problem, tech half-life continues to decrease. 30 years in the future is likely more comparable to 60 years in the past. Hello punch-cards.
• aborsy 5y ago
  How do you encrypt your data in a way that you can decrypt several decades later? The script you downloaded from GitHub, or data format used, may long be gone. Especially relevant if you store in the cloud (you should probably encrypt in that case).
  • hulitu 5y ago
    Rot13
• nudpiedo 5y ago
  Just go for a USB or Cloud backup. If you want something more durable you could codify the code on a QR and sculpt it on a rock, It may last some milenia.
• ryanmercer 5y ago
  Etch the code onto metal sheets? The CrafsMan has a DIY video on how to do it, he's also just a wonderful treat in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tYMUqsVhfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tYMUqsVhfc
• Hbruz0 5y ago
  Store it in the blockchain
  • teknopaul 5y ago
    1gb of data? Also make sure you don't chose one of the 100,000 or so that didn't last five minutes
• tjpnz 5y ago
  Write two copies to tape, keep one on your shelf and put another into longterm storage on a different tectonic plate.
  • hulitu 5y ago
    ... but take care that they are not too close to the fault ( San Andreas)
• agomez314 5y ago
  Wow! Thanks guys for all the helpful comments! I didn't think I'd get so many replies and ideas! Thank you, thank you!
• henkie_b 5y ago
  Wasn't USB stick storage (flash) one of the best options? I remember reading that these basically last forever if you don't actually use them.
• kurupt213 5y ago
  Blue ray? They are hardened so the surface shouldn’t scratch, and the laser burns a metallic core instead of polymer like writable DVD
• c3534l 5y ago
  I love how the answers in this thread range from highly technical subject matter expertise to build a pyramid and carve your data on the walls.
• nottorp 5y ago
  Multiple copies that are themselves copied to new mediums every few years.
• projektfu 5y ago
  SanDisk produced an archival SSD card that is supposed to be stable for at least 100 years. You could put that next to the instructions for reading through the SPI interface, which you can connect to with wires if a sd card slot were simply unavailable. The card is write-once. They run around $90-100. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1049391591/sandiskwormsd https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1049391591/sandiskwormsd
  • teknopaul 5y ago
    This is a neat idea. Raises the question, is there a device reader and screen that would last 100 years to make the system complete?
    • projektfu 5y ago
      Honestly, if there's no device that can read SPI in 100 years, then not having access to your digital artifacts is probably not a big concern... I would say that an e-ink display might last that long, and you could build a system with a microcontroller and a pretty adaptable power source. It could connect to a keyboard, or you could use a few buttons for a browsable interface. As long as nothing corrodes too badly. And you would want to inspect it for tin whiskers using a microscope or loupe before starting it up.
  • projektfu 5y ago
    oops, I meant SD card.
• usrn 5y ago
  I've been told paper/plastic tape is actually one of the best archival methods.
• pcrh 5y ago
  While not very practical (currently), for the sake of this discussion, it's worth including storage of digital data in DNA [0]. In theory, if the encoded data were inserted into an organism with a long history of survival, such as horseshoe crabs, it could be retrieved from their offspring in 100,000's of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage
• lazzlazzlazz 5y ago
  Do what the Internet Archive has done[1] for some content, and pay for storage on Arweave[2], where it will be stored permanently (~200 years) across a broad set of servers who are highly incentivized to keep it strictly intact. [1]: https://arweave.medium.com/arweave-the-internet-archive-building-a-verifiable-record-of-history-9787ba018020 https://arweave.medium.com/arweave-the-internet-archive-buil... [2]: https://arweave.org https://arweave.org
  • mkoryak 5y ago
    Wow that website is terrible on a phone. I wanted to know ardrive pricing but only found a page that asked me to find my wallet and take a picture. I left my wallet in another room, but I don't think this is what it meant. Too bad it didn't tell me much more than that.
• jhgb 5y ago
  > most stable form of digital storage? Well, if you're asking literally, then probably cuneiform clay tables (fired on purpose, of course). However, a higher density medium with a reasonable lifetime would probably be a 2D barcode engraved on a plate of stainless steel or something like that. The ultimate of course would be 3D storage in synthetic quartz, but as a DIY solution, that is much more difficult to write (you need a short pulse laser for that), or even to read (for 2D barcode, any camera works).
• inc 5y ago
  If you only need to store a small amount of text I sell a product that can theoretically hold data for over 200 years on ferroelectric RAM. Ideally you would store the data on several different mediums in different locations but this device may be something you'd want in that mix. https://machdyne.com/product/stahl-secure-storage-device/ https://machdyne.com/product/stahl-secure-storage-device/
• traceroute66 5y ago
  Perhaps you could consider turning it into an e-Book and depositing it with your local legal deposit library ? i.e. make it someone else's problem On a more serious note, there is lots of good information out there about digital preservation, e.g. from UK national archives[1] [1] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/manage-information/preserving-digital-records/guidance/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/m...
• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Your problem isn't storing the code, it's storing the environment it compiles and runs in. Even if it's plain command line C you're still going to have potential issues with compiler compatibility 30 years from now. C will probably be ok if you code defensively to avoid explicit hardware dependencies, but for all anyone knows C will only be available in museums by then. If it's something high level like Python, it's impossible to guess what state that ecosystem is going to be in 30 years from now. Same applies to operating systems and tooling. Vintage computer museum projects either store the complete hardware and software stack or run old code under emulation. This was easy when you had (for example...) a VAX or PDP-11 that was essentially self-contained. It's going to get harder as processing and dependencies become more and more distributed. I wouldn't even want to assume that something like Docker will look much like it does today, or if it does that it will be compatible with thirty year old images.
• ja27 5y ago
  Redundancy? I have a .tar.gz of my university account that's 25 years old at this point and a .ZIP of my old DOS, Turbo Pascal, etc. stuff that's a few years older. They've been copied so many times over the years and I'm not even sure the path my current copies took. They lived on floppies, on a CD-R for a long time, different PC hard drives, external backup hard drives, flash thumb drives, Dropbox / Google Drive / iCloud, and most recently a microSD card that lives in my MacBook's port. I'm sure it's been on a couple tapes and Zip disks but those media likely long outlived any installed drives I had. Can't remember ever getting a bit error or corruption on a copy. Even the CD-Rs that were well past their alleged lifespan read fine for me.
• stevezsa8 5y ago
  Less than 1GB is pretty easy. Copy-1. Compress a copy and email it to your self. Copy-2. Burn to a DVDR and keep it on your shelf. Copy-3. On a USB stick and store where you keep your passport. Copy-4. On your rolling backups (you have backups right?...). Copy-5&6. An extra DVDR and USB stick kept off-site (family/friend). Feel free to Encrypt it. Copy-7. Your rolling backups that you keep off-site. Encrypted. To be honest, since you already should have a good backup strategy, the cost should be like $5 for a couple USB sticks and DVDrs.
  • im3w1l 5y ago
    Yeah I think there is a lot to a strategy this simple. In the future there will be a big market for getting data from old media, and by picking normie-tech you will be able to tap into that. I might swap DVD-r for HDD (with cables to connect to either usb or sata), but either would probably be fine. 30 years is not that long. 1gb is not that much. They main concern is protecting yourself from being unlucky. "what if there is a fire" "what if I forget my password / get banned" "what if I drop my backups on the marble floor" "what if I die".
    • stevezsa8 4y ago
      I think off-site backups are the way to go regarding the fire scenario. Having a print out of where your financial assets are located is a good first step for the scenario you die. This way your next of kin can track them down. You should save your passwords in an encrypted file that gets backuped. I've not got a good solution for if your email provider bans you.
• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Paper. It's proven technology: written records last hundreds of years. You can easily encode arbitrary data as 8 bit mode QR codes and print them out. This gives you machine readability and error correction. Data density is not that good but it's very effective, especially for small amounts of data. I wrote some binary decoding patches for ZBar for this exact use case. You can, for example, store video games in a QR code: https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg
  • dolmen 5y ago
    Thank you very much for your videos!
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      The video is from someone else. He also contributed code to zbar.
• warrenm 5y ago
  You wrote a program that's a gigabyte of source code? I find that incredibly hard to believe
  • calibas 5y ago
    < 1GB
• carapace 5y ago
  Not really what you're asking for, and I can't find the project anymore (I think it's the search engines? I used to be good at this.) Anyway, there's a guy who etches data into ceramic discs and stores them in a cave or old mine in, um, I want to say Switzerland?. The discs themselves would conceivably last millions of years, and barring cave-in of the tunnels they're stored in, uh, yeah.
• noufalibrahim 5y ago
  Not completely related but I learnt programming partly from photocopies of "Game programming" books in BASIC (which I had to port dialects). My implementations of those programs are all gone. I have many of them on 5.25" disks but even if they're working, I have no way of reading them now. However, the photocopies books are still intact with the pages held together by an aging paper tag. Go figure.
• eru 5y ago
  I've heard that magneto-optical drives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive can keep your data for a real long time. But I think in all honesty are better off uploading your data to github, Google, dropbox (and whoever else you can find), and relying on at least one of them being around for so long.
• korse 5y ago
  What about tape? Tape cartridges are high volume, inexpensive and the drives can be found on eBay or similar for under $200. They don't do random access in any sort of reasonable time, but can be great for archival work. Also, isn't there at least thirty years of development roadmap on the books for tape?
• icedchai 5y ago
  Keep a copy on your local computer, either with cloud or local backup. Put another copy in a private github repo. Maybe email another copy to yourself, just in case. You should be fine.
• unethical_ban 5y ago
  Have a credit card you maintain, with dedicated cloud storage accounts on AWS, Backblaze, GCP and Azure. Upload your data to each of their services. AWS Glacier Deep Archive would charge pennies per month to store your data on their cold storage platform. Put a copy in four separate regions there, then again on the other platforms. Then buy your own M-Disc burner/reader, perhaps two for backup, and burn the data to that. "They" say the media will last decades or more. Who knows about the readers, though.
• taigi100 5y ago
  Print it out, make it into a painting kinda, sign it and enjoy it on your wall :)
• brudgers 5y ago
  Masked ROM.
• toraway1234 5y ago
• Parker_Powell 5y ago
  There are many different forms of digital storage, and each one has it's pros and cons. The most common form is magnetic storage, which is what you find on your hard drive or a floppy disk. It's really good at storing data and can hold a lot of it. However, it is not very stable. Magnetic storage degrades over time, meaning that the longer you use it, the more unreliable it becomes. This means that you need to frequently back up your data and/or replace your hard drive fairly regularly. Another form is optical storage, which stores information as a pattern of pits on a surface such as a CD-ROM or DVD. Optical storage is also not very stable, as discs can be scratched easily. But optical storage drives are cheap and easy to use (you probably already have one in your computer.) Optical drives can also read from many different types of discs, which makes them versatile. Finally there is tape storage, which records data onto magnetic tape like the kind used for analog audio cassettes. Tape storage is great for recording large amounts of data quickly, but accessing information on tape takes longer than accessing something stored on magnetic or optical media.