26 ms·

Very Long-Term Backup (2008)

206 points by tnorthcutt 4y ago

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Would love to have one of these as an heirloom paperweight, but maybe once the price of production has come down a bit: Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000
ofalkaed 4y ago
The Long Now is one of my favorite things, are there any other organizations/movements like it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fbdab103 4y ago
  There is/was the Lunar Library[0]. Sadly, their first mission crashed, and the contents are spilled out on the surface of the moon. I remember reading one of the organizers of the project was optimistic that the disks were likely to have (mostly) survived. [0]: https://www.archmission.org/spaceil https://www.archmission.org/spaceil
  - downrightmike 4y ago
    This is the one that had the water bears on it https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-spilled-tardigrades-on-the-moon/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-s...
- vitiral 4y ago
  Similar but very different is civboot.org Preserve by simplifying
tectonic 4y ago
Is Long Now still going strong? It feels like I haven’t heard much from them in a while. Still a big fan. Edit: and yes, I know they are philosophically opposed to doing anything quickly.
- ofalkaed 4y ago
  They are still going, their clock is under construction and if memory serves they have already hollowed out the mountain. Their website is not great for providing information.
- bryananderson 4y ago
  Their cocktail bar at Fort Mason is still awesome, if nothing else
tomcam 4y ago
> This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998 01998. Please.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  It seems entirely consistent with their raison d'être.
  - neilv 4y ago
    It's easy to interpret their leading zero to mean "use 5-digit representation of years", when (after Y2K and similar problems) I would've expected a better message to be "don't limit the time points that can be represented". Maybe they have an additional assumption: that humanity won't ever need to consider years past 99,999 in a Gregorian calendar.
    - californical 4y ago
      According to the linked article, Their whole purpose was/is to “think 10,000 years in the future instead of quarterly”, so they only need 5 digits for that goal.
      - WinnieRallycar 4y ago
        This was the first I'd heard of Long Now, but upon reading the article, I had assumed the leading 0 was representative of the infinite continuum of 0's in-front. But all the repetitive 0's had been slimmed down to one, like :: in IPv6
    - otherme123 4y ago
      Yet they say things like "Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years". Come on, we can read text in almost any language from 1,000 years ago, and they didn't care at all about leaving durable texts. A couple of days ago there was this history about a norwegian carved graffiti from around 1,000 AD in Venetia, still readable. They should aim for 10,000 years.
wanderingstan 4y ago
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. 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.)
- teraflop 4y ago
  IPFS is a content distribution system that doesn't really solve the problem of archiving and preserving data. It can only be relied on to "store" data as long as at least one node has the data pinned, so really it's just pushing the problem around.
- downrightmike 4y ago
  Offline high quality flash storage in a fireproof safe. Probably degrades the least.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Make sure it's a 125 degree fire safe. And I'd trust tape over flash, even brand new flash, if it's going to be offline for years. And since you need a second copy to be even close to safe, I'd try to prepay a historically reliable web host for many years of service. And/or get a safe deposit box.
    - downrightmike 4y ago
      You should know that safe deposits are no longer put into newly built banks anymore and aren't a profit center, so banks are closing their boxes and shipping contents to self storage places, often with items missing in the shuffle. Wells Fargo seems to be the worst for theft. But the bank can and will open your safe and move it to self storage if it saves them a cent.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Secondary_storages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Secondary_sto... you should copy solid state media every 10 years.
antondd 4y ago
Tangentially related, but I highly recommend Long Now seminars. The caliber of guests and the variety of topics are really, really good. https://longnow.org/seminars/ https://longnow.org/seminars/
ofalkaed 4y ago
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. 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. 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. I don'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.
- 7373737373 4y ago
  > I think they are right in the idea that humanity lost something important when it ceased building monuments https://www.earthpyramid.org https://www.earthpyramid.org may be an exception to this
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dang 4y ago
Related: Very Long-Term Backup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282572 - Aug 2008 (28 comments)
- downrightmike 4y ago
  They made a smaller run of 100 nickel coins https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvdgn7/this-old-school-wearable-puts-a-thousand-languages-around-your-neck https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvdgn7/this-old-school-weara...
antiviral 4y ago
>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. I haven't used a DVD in at least 5+ years, so this statement is becoming reality very quickly.
Tepix 4y ago
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's capacity of 100GB per BD-XL disc. They should last 100 years or more ("up to 1000 years"). The 100GB BD-XL discs are quite expensive however (14€ each). They also seem to get harder to find. 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. 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. If you have more data, consider LTO drives and copy them every 5-15(?) years.
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  I have the same long time archiving strategy. Every year i burn an identical set of discs with the past years photos, and store them in separate locations. I use a mix of 25GB and 100GB discs, depending on the previous years photo activity (Covid-19 years fit on 25GB discs :D ) I also maintain a couple of external drives at the same locations that are surface scanned/updated/rotated yearly. I use no form of encryption or archiving software, and while some discs have a PAR2 file "embedded" this is not my regular practice. I don't want to be in a situation 20 years from now where i've forgotten the encryption password to my archive (though in 20 years todays encryption will probably be "trivial" to break) > They also seem to get harder to find I have noticed the same, and i hope that the industry realizes that there is a need for long term archiving at a consumer level price. Considering that all family photos these days are essentially all digital, there is either the option to archive it, or make physical copies, which is something i have considered as well. When it comes to documents, i make normal backups, but i don't archive them. The archive is disaster recovery, and if everything else has failed (including 3-2-1 backups), i doubt my 10+ year old documents are worth anything to me. Anything important exists in government databases and/or as physical copies. This may of course not be the case for everybody.
- onion2k 4y ago
  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. I think finding a device to read the media is likely to be a bigger challenge than finding media that lasts 100 years. I strongly doubt a normal Blu-ray player would last that long unless it was kept in a controlled environment.
seszett 4y ago
Why nickel? I can't find an explanation on this page, maybe it's simply ease of manufacturing. Iron is the most stable element, but I suppose this is mostly irrelevant at the kind of scales we are talking about.
- marsten 4y ago
  Nickel is chemically and mechanically durable and doesn't easily oxidize like iron does.
amichal 4y ago
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/cooling for a small data center. BUT. 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. Correspondingly, nearly all of the paper records I'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.
- nix23 4y ago
  Why not do it like Github? It's a 1000 years lifespan: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://www.piql.com/case-studies/github-chooses-piql-for-perpetual-data-storage/ https://www.piql.com/case-studies/github-chooses-piql-for-pe...
  - mmarquezs 4y ago
    Here explains more about their PiqlFilm if somebody is curious like me: https://www.piql.com/about/technology/ https://www.piql.com/about/technology/ I also I always find it very amusing that some of my shitty code is preserved in the Artic due to this GitHub project.
    - nix23 4y ago
      >my shitty code is preserved in the Artic due to this GitHub project Look i was just happy that mine was not used in a mars mission ;)
- rvense 4y ago
IAmNotAFix 4y ago
TL;DR: "well-cared for" Copying from one digital medium to another is a very easy operation (to the contrary of copying from paper to paper). At equal "care" I don't see why digital backups should be worse than paper ones.
jeffrallen 4y ago
Needs an 02008 tag. :)
sigg3 4y ago
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's a solution for a non-existent problem. 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. 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. 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.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Yup I was gonna say, we keep everything very well organized like worker ants but then in 300 hundred years, who cares who married who, who worked where, who thought what beyond passionate historians. There simply is no value in minute details of the past if you kinda get and preserve the big picture. And even if you do, future people are too entrenched in their beliefs to understand past people.
- komali2 4y ago
  Reading David graeber lately, ancient humans have a great deal to teach us about social organizing, politics, and economics. Also, I think things have value beyond their bare utility.
HybridCurve 4y ago
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.
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
I hope there are suitable caveats around the Genesis text being mythology - I'd hate to imagine far-future generations scratching their heads at how otherwise technologically sophisticated people could image that this stuff was true.
- lyu07282 4y ago
  lots of people believe it literally though and the majority of us are religous, we are exactly those otherwise technologically sophisticated people you are describing.
  - vertis 4y ago
    If you're a christian then creation/young earth is very important to protect, without it you have no "fall of man" and therefore no reason for a saviour. Accepting death before sin also complicates matters significantly (as you must if you accept evolution). That and Jesus' legitimacy as a saviour is based off a bunch of prophecy and lineage from some of the earlier texts, including Genesis.
lyu07282 4y ago
Using Genesis doesn'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?
- jerjerjer 4y ago
  The point is the language, not the content, I assume. Although dictionary + grammar textbooks would have been better. I'm also not sure about thousands of languages (the goal being all of them). Throughout history, there may have been a hundred of lingua francas. A few hundred tops. We also see a constant desire of people to leave writings in the most popular language of the era. It makes sense, too: they want the largest percentage of people to be able to consume their writing. Creating dictionary pairs + grammar textbooks + science textbooks for a (still) large but limited number of languages popular now and in the past would be more beneficial to future linguists.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  Putting it in enough places is how Genesis and most other religious and cultural texts still survive.
- Aaargh20318 4y ago
  > Using Genesis doesn't sound like such a good idea That was also my first reaction, but thinking about it a bit more there might be a practical reason for it: they included genesis 1-3 in 1500 languages. I bet there aren’t many texts available that have that many translations, if at all, outside of the bible.
public_defender 4y ago
This is interesting, but in terms of longevity, how does it compare to carving letters one centimeter high in stone? Let's say for example, we tried doing that underground on Pluto.
- komali2 4y ago
  For those unaware this is a reference to the Three Body Problem trilogy, where some people out together a human archive on Pluto as described.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
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. 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'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. 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.
- asah 4y ago
  Given exponentially decreasing costs for storage, there's an argument for archiving everything of potential value and low liability risk. Ditto for store-width and testing recoverability.
  - crabbone 4y ago
    Exponentially decreasing cost of storage is a myth. Storage is super expensive. It may be tempting to consider only some metrics (eg. the price of acquisition of the hardware), but the operational costs aren't getting much lower if at all.
    - cmeacham98 4y ago
      At sufficient scale the per-GB (or per-TB/per-PB/etc) price of the storage dwarfs all other costs. A small business might have trouble archiving everything, but most large businesses should see and be able to take advantage of this difference.
mmcgaha 4y ago
My great grandfather was born in 1845. As interesting as it would be to see photos and video from his time period, I don'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.
- komali2 4y ago
  I journal basically daily. Once a year I do a "year compass" and part of the process is skimming all my journals. It's extremely time consuming but very valuable. Other than that I rarely look at old journals unless I need to find something i forgot. I think I'm just too busy and focused on the now. That's probably ok. I've been visiting my friend who was recently hospitalized unexpectedly and he says he's really bored all day. I feel like in his shoes that would be a good time to read and reflect on my life a bit, especially if I was nearing the end. I don't know, it doesn't really matter, the process of writing alone is valuable enough. (Plus I journal in org roam and org roamify all my entries. Maybe one day that'll be useful to me. It already has once or twice when I'm looking up prior software evaluations)
  - marsten 4y ago
    In raw form your journals may be more than anyone would care to read, but AI tools could make them interesting to future people. (a) Tools that synthesize down your life story and most interesting thoughts into N pages, (b) AIs that train on all that data to create a virtual version of you after you're gone (several companies already do this).
boilerupnc 4y ago
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/store many redundant copies. I'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 :-) [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-the-ultimate-data-storage-solution/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-the-ultimate-... [1] https://www.twistbioscience.com/resources/video/how-does-dna-data-storage-work https://www.twistbioscience.com/resources/video/how-does-dna... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA
vagab0nd 4y ago
> Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone. Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years. It depends. If it's some unimportant personal data, sure. If it's the only backup of the entire Wikipedia, I'm sure we can find a way to read it off whatever it's on.
aborsy 4y ago
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. 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.
mrlonglong 4y ago
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.

206 points by tnorthcutt 4y ago

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

ofalkaed 4y ago

The Long Now is one of my favorite things, are there any other organizations/movements like it?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fbdab103 4y ago
There is/was the Lunar Library[0]. Sadly, their first mission crashed, and the contents are spilled out on the surface of the moon. I remember reading one of the organizers of the project was optimistic that the disks were likely to have (mostly) survived. [0]: https://www.archmission.org/spaceil https://www.archmission.org/spaceil
- downrightmike 4y ago
  This is the one that had the water bears on it https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-spilled-tardigrades-on-the-moon/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-s...
vitiral 4y ago
Similar but very different is civboot.org Preserve by simplifying

tectonic 4y ago

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

ofalkaed 4y ago
They are still going, their clock is under construction and if memory serves they have already hollowed out the mountain. Their website is not great for providing information.
bryananderson 4y ago
Their cocktail bar at Fort Mason is still awesome, if nothing else

tomcam 4y ago

> This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998 01998. Please.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
It seems entirely consistent with their raison d'être.
- neilv 4y ago
  It's easy to interpret their leading zero to mean "use 5-digit representation of years", when (after Y2K and similar problems) I would've expected a better message to be "don't limit the time points that can be represented". Maybe they have an additional assumption: that humanity won't ever need to consider years past 99,999 in a Gregorian calendar.
  - californical 4y ago
    According to the linked article, Their whole purpose was/is to “think 10,000 years in the future instead of quarterly”, so they only need 5 digits for that goal.
    - WinnieRallycar 4y ago
      This was the first I'd heard of Long Now, but upon reading the article, I had assumed the leading 0 was representative of the infinite continuum of 0's in-front. But all the repetitive 0's had been slimmed down to one, like :: in IPv6
  - otherme123 4y ago
    Yet they say things like "Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years". Come on, we can read text in almost any language from 1,000 years ago, and they didn't care at all about leaving durable texts. A couple of days ago there was this history about a norwegian carved graffiti from around 1,000 AD in Venetia, still readable. They should aim for 10,000 years.

wanderingstan 4y ago

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. 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.)

teraflop 4y ago
IPFS is a content distribution system that doesn't really solve the problem of archiving and preserving data. It can only be relied on to "store" data as long as at least one node has the data pinned, so really it's just pushing the problem around.
downrightmike 4y ago
Offline high quality flash storage in a fireproof safe. Probably degrades the least.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Make sure it's a 125 degree fire safe. And I'd trust tape over flash, even brand new flash, if it's going to be offline for years. And since you need a second copy to be even close to safe, I'd try to prepay a historically reliable web host for many years of service. And/or get a safe deposit box.
  - downrightmike 4y ago
    You should know that safe deposits are no longer put into newly built banks anymore and aren't a profit center, so banks are closing their boxes and shipping contents to self storage places, often with items missing in the shuffle. Wells Fargo seems to be the worst for theft. But the bank can and will open your safe and move it to self storage if it saves them a cent.
- Tepix 4y ago
  According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Secondary_storages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Secondary_sto... you should copy solid state media every 10 years.

antondd 4y ago

Tangentially related, but I highly recommend Long Now seminars. The caliber of guests and the variety of topics are really, really good. https://longnow.org/seminars/ https://longnow.org/seminars/

ofalkaed 4y ago

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. 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. 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. I don'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.

7373737373 4y ago
> I think they are right in the idea that humanity lost something important when it ceased building monuments https://www.earthpyramid.org https://www.earthpyramid.org may be an exception to this

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dang 4y ago

Related: Very Long-Term Backup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282572 - Aug 2008 (28 comments)

downrightmike 4y ago
They made a smaller run of 100 nickel coins https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvdgn7/this-old-school-wearable-puts-a-thousand-languages-around-your-neck https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvdgn7/this-old-school-weara...

antiviral 4y ago

>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. I haven't used a DVD in at least 5+ years, so this statement is becoming reality very quickly.

Tepix 4y ago

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's capacity of 100GB per BD-XL disc. They should last 100 years or more ("up to 1000 years"). The 100GB BD-XL discs are quite expensive however (14€ each). They also seem to get harder to find. 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. 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. If you have more data, consider LTO drives and copy them every 5-15(?) years.

8fingerlouie 4y ago
I have the same long time archiving strategy. Every year i burn an identical set of discs with the past years photos, and store them in separate locations. I use a mix of 25GB and 100GB discs, depending on the previous years photo activity (Covid-19 years fit on 25GB discs :D ) I also maintain a couple of external drives at the same locations that are surface scanned/updated/rotated yearly. I use no form of encryption or archiving software, and while some discs have a PAR2 file "embedded" this is not my regular practice. I don't want to be in a situation 20 years from now where i've forgotten the encryption password to my archive (though in 20 years todays encryption will probably be "trivial" to break) > They also seem to get harder to find I have noticed the same, and i hope that the industry realizes that there is a need for long term archiving at a consumer level price. Considering that all family photos these days are essentially all digital, there is either the option to archive it, or make physical copies, which is something i have considered as well. When it comes to documents, i make normal backups, but i don't archive them. The archive is disaster recovery, and if everything else has failed (including 3-2-1 backups), i doubt my 10+ year old documents are worth anything to me. Anything important exists in government databases and/or as physical copies. This may of course not be the case for everybody.
onion2k 4y ago
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. I think finding a device to read the media is likely to be a bigger challenge than finding media that lasts 100 years. I strongly doubt a normal Blu-ray player would last that long unless it was kept in a controlled environment.

seszett 4y ago

Why nickel? I can't find an explanation on this page, maybe it's simply ease of manufacturing. Iron is the most stable element, but I suppose this is mostly irrelevant at the kind of scales we are talking about.

marsten 4y ago
Nickel is chemically and mechanically durable and doesn't easily oxidize like iron does.

amichal 4y ago

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/cooling for a small data center. BUT. 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. Correspondingly, nearly all of the paper records I'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.

nix23 4y ago
Why not do it like Github? It's a 1000 years lifespan: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://www.piql.com/case-studies/github-chooses-piql-for-perpetual-data-storage/ https://www.piql.com/case-studies/github-chooses-piql-for-pe...
- mmarquezs 4y ago
  Here explains more about their PiqlFilm if somebody is curious like me: https://www.piql.com/about/technology/ https://www.piql.com/about/technology/ I also I always find it very amusing that some of my shitty code is preserved in the Artic due to this GitHub project.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >my shitty code is preserved in the Artic due to this GitHub project Look i was just happy that mine was not used in a mars mission ;)
rvense 4y ago

IAmNotAFix 4y ago

TL;DR: "well-cared for" Copying from one digital medium to another is a very easy operation (to the contrary of copying from paper to paper). At equal "care" I don't see why digital backups should be worse than paper ones.

jeffrallen 4y ago

Needs an 02008 tag. :)

sigg3 4y ago

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's a solution for a non-existent problem. 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. 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. 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.

xwolfi 4y ago
Yup I was gonna say, we keep everything very well organized like worker ants but then in 300 hundred years, who cares who married who, who worked where, who thought what beyond passionate historians. There simply is no value in minute details of the past if you kinda get and preserve the big picture. And even if you do, future people are too entrenched in their beliefs to understand past people.
komali2 4y ago
Reading David graeber lately, ancient humans have a great deal to teach us about social organizing, politics, and economics. Also, I think things have value beyond their bare utility.

HybridCurve 4y ago

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.

tragomaskhalos 4y ago

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

lyu07282 4y ago
lots of people believe it literally though and the majority of us are religous, we are exactly those otherwise technologically sophisticated people you are describing.
- vertis 4y ago
  If you're a christian then creation/young earth is very important to protect, without it you have no "fall of man" and therefore no reason for a saviour. Accepting death before sin also complicates matters significantly (as you must if you accept evolution). That and Jesus' legitimacy as a saviour is based off a bunch of prophecy and lineage from some of the earlier texts, including Genesis.

lyu07282 4y ago

Using Genesis doesn'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?

jerjerjer 4y ago
The point is the language, not the content, I assume. Although dictionary + grammar textbooks would have been better. I'm also not sure about thousands of languages (the goal being all of them). Throughout history, there may have been a hundred of lingua francas. A few hundred tops. We also see a constant desire of people to leave writings in the most popular language of the era. It makes sense, too: they want the largest percentage of people to be able to consume their writing. Creating dictionary pairs + grammar textbooks + science textbooks for a (still) large but limited number of languages popular now and in the past would be more beneficial to future linguists.
theandrewbailey 4y ago
Putting it in enough places is how Genesis and most other religious and cultural texts still survive.
Aaargh20318 4y ago
> Using Genesis doesn't sound like such a good idea That was also my first reaction, but thinking about it a bit more there might be a practical reason for it: they included genesis 1-3 in 1500 languages. I bet there aren’t many texts available that have that many translations, if at all, outside of the bible.

public_defender 4y ago

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

komali2 4y ago
For those unaware this is a reference to the Three Body Problem trilogy, where some people out together a human archive on Pluto as described.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

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. 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'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. 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.

asah 4y ago
Given exponentially decreasing costs for storage, there's an argument for archiving everything of potential value and low liability risk. Ditto for store-width and testing recoverability.
- crabbone 4y ago
  Exponentially decreasing cost of storage is a myth. Storage is super expensive. It may be tempting to consider only some metrics (eg. the price of acquisition of the hardware), but the operational costs aren't getting much lower if at all.
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    At sufficient scale the per-GB (or per-TB/per-PB/etc) price of the storage dwarfs all other costs. A small business might have trouble archiving everything, but most large businesses should see and be able to take advantage of this difference.

mmcgaha 4y ago

My great grandfather was born in 1845. As interesting as it would be to see photos and video from his time period, I don'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.

komali2 4y ago
I journal basically daily. Once a year I do a "year compass" and part of the process is skimming all my journals. It's extremely time consuming but very valuable. Other than that I rarely look at old journals unless I need to find something i forgot. I think I'm just too busy and focused on the now. That's probably ok. I've been visiting my friend who was recently hospitalized unexpectedly and he says he's really bored all day. I feel like in his shoes that would be a good time to read and reflect on my life a bit, especially if I was nearing the end. I don't know, it doesn't really matter, the process of writing alone is valuable enough. (Plus I journal in org roam and org roamify all my entries. Maybe one day that'll be useful to me. It already has once or twice when I'm looking up prior software evaluations)
- marsten 4y ago
  In raw form your journals may be more than anyone would care to read, but AI tools could make them interesting to future people. (a) Tools that synthesize down your life story and most interesting thoughts into N pages, (b) AIs that train on all that data to create a virtual version of you after you're gone (several companies already do this).

boilerupnc 4y ago

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/store many redundant copies. I'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 :-) [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-the-ultimate-data-storage-solution/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-the-ultimate-... [1] https://www.twistbioscience.com/resources/video/how-does-dna-data-storage-work https://www.twistbioscience.com/resources/video/how-does-dna... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA

vagab0nd 4y ago

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

aborsy 4y ago

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. 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.

mrlonglong 4y ago

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.