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Nanofiche: Small Storage, for Forever
- ahazred8ta 3y agoEtched nickel fiche sheets, 2000 pages per square cm.
- wolfram74 3y agoOne thing I was curious about in that post I didn't catch was what kind of reader they would need. I've been a bit curious about the state of microfiche readers in the recent past, and going much denser is going to require even more niche fiche reacher. I mean reader. They list the unusual machine as a downside for microfiche, but don't mention what kind of machine they'll need.
- rolfvandekrol 3y agoIn the FAQ on https://nanofiche.com/services/ https://nanofiche.com/services/ they claim that a microscope should be sufficient to retrieve the engraved information.
- barbegal 3y agoThe numbers suggest a ~1000:1 reduction in scale so a 1000x optical microscope should be more than sufficient. But finding the information you are searching for at that scale sounds difficult unless pages are indexed and numbered in both the x and y axes.
- tingletech 3y agoAs with microfiche, it seems like the page number should be sufficient as long as you know how many pages per column or row.
- canadaduane 3y agoPatents are from 2010 - 2014. For most people, I guess the technology would be available to use in 2034?
- mrb 3y agoTheir math is erroneous. They claim at, 300 dpi, a capacity of 300,000 analog images, per letter size sheet of Nanofiche, and at 600 dpi a capacity of 150,000 images. But the jump from 300 to 600 dpi requires four times (not two times) the capacity. So they probably can store only 75,000 images at 600 dpi.
- wkat4242 3y agoRemember it's analog tech. Perhaps the 150dpi mode doesn't fully exploit the resolution of the material and the higher modes do? I could imagine they would not want to make a single page too small (makes the readers more complex) so perhaps they draw the low-res images a bit bigger than needed.
- bombcar 3y agoAnd people assume DPI and LPI (lines per inch, the vertical) are the same but there’s no reason they have to be.
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- ThinkBeat 3y agoThat seemed a bit over exhuberant I think. The problem is that to test the hypothesis will take a really long time.
- strken 3y agoIt's really weird to me that this can be patented. Not that it's a bad patent, I just thought people had been doing nanometre scale photolithography with other metals for decades.
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- rtkwe 3y agoLots of small steps like this get patented and have to be challenged in court before they're released.
- ekianjo 3y agoPatented means it will have lower adoption and fail to store info that will be essential to capture on time
- genewitch 3y agoIBM made a 3 atom wide transistor about 23 years ago, and just for fun constructed a model of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek (and no, i don't know which one, but i'd assume the one from TOS) out of atoms. Then they patented it and tucked it away in their vaults.
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- seanhunter 3y agoSeems a terrible patent: 1)Demonstrably no novelty whatsoever. "My device does what they do just a bit smaller" isn't novelty unless the processes themselves are some kind of breakthrough which these clearly aren't. 2)Not being obvious is one of the conditions for a patent is the US[1]. It seems you could make a strong argument for this being obvious in the sense that a)it is. "We have a thing that stores information by making it small. We want to store more information... I know let's make it smaller." is definitely an obvious chain of reasoning b)to make it more obvious they even helped your argument by naming their thing after the one that's a bit bigger and just changed the name to the next engineering prefix down in scale. 3)Very clearly undermines their whole facade about doing something for the benefit of humanity. [1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/essentials https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/essentials
- wkat4242 3y agoI wonder if this could be used for digital tech too. Though I assume the density would be pretty low then compared to other optical methods like Archival Blu-Rays. The longevity however is much higher if it really is as promised.
- livrem 3y ago"It also worth noting that Nanofiche primarily stores data in analog format, but can also be used to encode digital data for archival preservation as well — either as analog images of digital bitmaps, or in native digital formats (such as DVD format)". Does not say at what density.
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- crtified 3y ago(mostly joking) On the downside, it makes it really really hard to find post-apocalyptic evidence of alien species, from the other side of the universe. "Sir, we've set up our 3 kilometre array of precisely calibrated space telescopes, capable of detecting the slightest wobble in the deep space radio frequencies, and automatically translating all possible alien languages!" Aliens: No bueno. You'll actually need to find the 1 millimetre disc of quantum-lithographed Nickel buried on one of our physical moons, 1000 light years from your location. There, you'll find our entire history and knowledge! Enjoy! ;)
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI mean, if you have the tech developed enough, you could etch such information on every rock you come across. With something like nano-machines or GMO'd bacteria. Probably have some info in the machines/bacteria anyway, but basic text but small would probably be more discoverable. Imagine a stretch of desert extending past the horizon in all directions, each grain of sand containing a wikipedia-worth of information, mostly redundant. Hopefully useful, and not maddening like the monolith from 2001.
- eternityforest 3y agoIf you're in a scifi movie and you find a monolith, it's probably gonna be a hassle!
- crazygringo 3y ago> The only sure-fire way to guarantee that important information can be recovered in the event of a catastrophic event, is to back it up with specialized archival media that are designed to survive and be recoverable, even without access to computers and electronics. I mean, I guess you don't need a computer to read this, but you sure do need a good microscope. I guess I'm not really entirely sure of the point. If you're really trying to preserve basic knowledge to restart civilization, I'd think you'd want libraries of full-size readable books spread across the world. Not something that requires you to first build a microscope. While if you're trying to store as much historical and technological data as possible, it seems like you'd want to encode it digitally with error correction codes, not as optically readable text. The encoding/decoding instructions can easily fit on a single cover page, optically encoded.
- Clamchop 3y agoYou're focusing on how hard it will be to read but the central thrust is whether it is recoverable at all. Can't read what no longer exists, by any means. Paper disintegrates without maintenance. Tape disintegrates. Hard drives lose magnetization. SSDs lose their charge states. Stone erodes. Several of these won't survive fire, water, magnetic fields, or radiation. Also, I don't see why you couldn't store digital data on this, for example as pits and lands, or base 64 text, or some other scheme, with error correction of your choice. (But if it's as durable as they say, it's not as necessary.) But, that requires additional effort to decode. I enjoy research into highly stable means of storing data. I think Microsoft Research was developing a technique of storing data in a 3D arrangement in glass. Very fascinating.
- bastawhiz 3y ago> Paper disintegrates without maintenance. Tape disintegrates. Hard drives lose magnetization. SSDs lose their charge states. Stone erodes. Several of these won't survive fire, water, magnetic fields, or radiation. Computers, peripherals, microscopes, and any other devices needed to access some incredibly durable archival format will also degrade. The information needed to produce new ones will need to be archived, and that material will degrade and need archiving. Do you know how much information is necessary to describe all of the details relevant to producing an extremely good microscope from scratch? It's not just the parts and materials, it's the entirety of the supply chain: the mining, refining, electronics, power production, and everything else. All of that information needs to be accessibly preserved. So it begs the question, is it really easier to make the prerequisite for the information's use be a working precision instrument or is it easier to just actively maintain lots of copies of less durable materials like books? If the sky falls tomorrow, how many years is some archive really useful for in any format? Most of a sturdy, well-designed library of books will probably survive for a decade. A good percentage will probably survive a century. On the other hand, a high precision microscope probably won't "just work" after a decade or two of sitting around disused in unideal conditions. A working power supply would probably last even less time. We must accept that there's some ongoing upkeep of an archive regardless of how durable its contents are. And while a book isn't as durable as some quartz or other fancy material, you can pretty easily make books to replace old ones even in pretty miserable conditions (we did it for centuries, albeit at great cost). There's a remarkably high cost to making sure there's a working microscope around, and keeping the information and resources necessary to make new ones and repair existing ones available.
- calo_star 3y agoBook-films!
- doublepg23 3y agoI think my only exposure to this tech has been X-Files.
- ekianjo 3y agoX files was microfiche
- quickthrower2 3y agoI wish the articles would use bytes as an information storage measure.
- clnq 3y ago> For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. All this depends on the font used, and what kind of information is stored. But using lorem ipsum, and Verdana, and only uppercase characters, spaces, and periods, I found that you can fit about 49,500 characters in a letter format page at "150 dpi" [0] This is 396 million characters in a 2 x 2 cm sheet. The Latin ASCII alphabet has 26 letters, but in my experiment, there were commas and periods. Though at the resolution I used, commas and periods would be difficult do differentiate if there was almost any degradation or printing error. So let's say it's a 27 character set. Maybe we can stick a few more numbers or symbols in there to get to 32, although some numbers like 1, 0, and 5 look like letters, so not all would be usable at this resolution. If each character can represent 32 states, that is equivalent to 5 bits per character. 5 x 396 million is 1.98 short billion bits. That is 247.5 million bytes. Or 247.5 megabytes. This is in 4 square centimeters, so the data density is about 61.9 megabytes per square centimeter. If we give up human readability and the text would be regular language (according to Zipf's Law), we could expect up to 0.2 compression ratios. Or 310 megabytes per square centimeter. On the other hand, we could then use quite dense data storage methods like barcodes. But these calculations are a bit pointless because this is meant to be read without a computer. A DVD has a readable surface area of about 89.2 square centimeters on each side (some DVDs are multi-sided) and 4.7 to 8.5 gigabytes of storage in that space. So it stores between 54 and 97.6 megabytes per square centimeter. For storing plain text, it might be on the same order of magnitude in terms of space efficiency as a DVD, but it is human-readable. If the data is not human readable, then it could be at least 5 times more efficient than a DVD. Which is closer to a Blu-ray disk. Back-of-the-napkin, might contain errors, many assumptions made. The goal is to understand the order of magnitude with some errors. In short - it looks like it's not 100x more or less efficient than writing a plain text file to a DVD. P.S. I chose Verdana as it was a quite legible sans-serif font. I then created a texture of random black and white pixels, and applied it at 25% opacity to simulate a significant degree of printing error at the supposed resolution they can print at. The font at the chosen size remained just about legible with that kind of interference [1]. The exception is periods and commas, which are difficult to tell apart. That is why I considered them one character before. Making the font even 10% smaller would make it really difficult to read. This is all not grounded in any technique or proper estimation method, I just wanted to show why it seems like going smaller might be difficult. [0] https://i.imgur.com/Pi8acSk.png https://i.imgur.com/Pi8acSk.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/stFkXQy.png https://i.imgur.com/stFkXQy.png
- 10g1k 3y agoStar Trek magic crystal data storage: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/5d-data-storage-how-does-it-work-and-when-can-we-use-it/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/5d-data-storage-how-do...
- NKosmatos 3y agoGood luck finding a nanofiche “reader” in a couple of thousand years :-) People nowadays are struggling to find devices (and software drivers) to read old formats/mediums from a few decades back, imagine how difficult it’s going to be to find a working nanofiche device and support for it under Windows 9000 in the year 9000AD. I like the idea, the nickel based storage medium, the improvements in capacity and all the other advantages listed, but I don’t like the proprietary technology.
- patmcc 3y ago>>>Good luck finding a nanofiche “reader” in a couple of thousand years :-) A nanofice "reader" is literally just a microscope, isn't it?. Probably a very good microscope, which may or may not be difficult, given the technology of the time, but generally thought to be understandable. You'd store a bunch of this 'nanofiche' in a place, and have some diagrams/example documents with small text getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and the curious people/aliens would (hopefully) understand the idea, know enough about optics to magnify, and boom, they've got the data.
- ta93754829 3y agoi love this idea of storing a trail of smaller and smaller data, almost forcing them to invent microscopes to keep reading...
- crooked-v 3y ago"Hurry up with that new microscope! I need to find out what happens to Frodo!"
- genewitch 3y agoFrylock, don't touch my computer
- flavius29663 3y agowhy force them, when you can teach them? Lay the basics of geometry, optics, glass etc. is human readable format, with ever smaller fonts.
- slyall 3y agoAre there actually any live projects to use technology like this to create many distributed copies of information to "survive the fall of civilisation" etc? I know the Long Now foundation has the Rosetta project but that doesn't seem very live. It would seem straightforward to use technology like this to create 10,000 copies of something that could be widely distributed.
- photonerd 3y agoThey did. The long now used it about a decade ago.
- slyall 3y agoBut the Long Now project seems to be dormant. I'm looking for a live project that is doing this. Or maybe we could start one.
- 8organicbits 3y agoGiven the long term focus of the Long Now project, wouldn't it be expected to look dormant?
- photonerd 3y agoThat’s par for the course for the Long Now. It’s basically a bunch of rich folks circle jerking themselves as a hobby. Don’t get me wrong: love the goal. Practically tho it’s basically just nerd hobby projects
- threeseed 3y agoRelated is Microsoft's Silica which is storing 7TB on square quartz glass platters. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil... Long-term archival storage is going to be an important industry as our data volumes grow.
- wmf 3y agoI assume glass storage would degrade under radiation which is why they want to use nickel on the moon. Silica is cool for earth though.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoIsn't the moon slated to [on an extremely long-term basis, not quite red-dwarfed-Sun timeline] eventually escape Earth's gravity?
- fbdab103 3y agoIs this being actively used outside of Microsoft? I remember reading that the film industry has groups who do effectively nothing but copy films from one storage technology to another because of the size of their archives means there is always something stored on too-old media.
- hammock 3y agoDon't drop one!
- mickdarling 3y agoMy favorite head slapping dumb part about Microsoft’s Silica is the goofy little robots that are the only means to find unlabeled, unadorned identical glass slabs. No human readable filing system, no cartridge to protect the 7TB slab from falling and breaking. Just a goofy awkward robot that will certainly be robust for, what was the number, 10,000 years?
- codemac 3y ago> Long-term archival storage is going to be an important industry as our data volumes grow. Unless you care about reading your data, as then it won't be important. Let me know when tape starts taking more of the global storage market share. It's a super mature, functional, and far higher performance storage media, and it's total percentage of global bytes shipped dwindle.
- photonerd 3y agoOne day this tech will be available to regular people. The LongNow used it for some random codex & then seems to have dropped it. Last I saw it was mostly used by one single jeweler, bizarrely.
- textfiles 3y agoHear me, and hear me clear: Fuck any proprietary format trying to own the ability to recover history.
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- rabbitofdeath 3y agoWhy is this getting downvoted?! This is absolutely detrimental to any future history!
- textfiles 3y agoDon't worry, I'll emotionally recover.
- Dylan16807 3y agoLargely because there's nothing proprietary about the format, and even less about recovering data from it because you just look at it under a microscope.
- komali2 3y agoIt's not a proprietary format is it? Just a proprietary method of printing. It's just written text (format). Though I agree it should be simply open license.
- xeyownt 3y agoIn one thousand years, any format will be proprietary.
- doubloon 3y agoover the years i have come to feel the best preservation of information is not actually technology, it is culture. instilling the cultural value of respect for knowledge and history is the only actual way that knowledge gets preserved. we go through cycles of anti-intellectualism as a species and the anti-intellectuals will always find a way to attack knowledge regardless of technology used to preserve it. if you carve stones, they will break them. if you write books they will burn them. if you make an internet they will firewall it or buy it or sue it. if you put plates of nickel on the moon, they will figure out how to go there, dig it up, and destroy it too. but most of all what they do is attack the idea of the intellectual as valuable to society. Look at how we treat Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan. We treat them like criminals, while people who jail and murder intellectuals we call leaders and presidents. We live in an anti-intellectual era right now. Not that it is not important to try. but there are some problems we cant solve by tech alone. We have to figure out what is wrong with us, as a species, that we constantly try to destroy our own knowledge.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheMode 3y agoIs it even desirable to store data for millennia? What's wrong with humans wanting to destroy knowledge? As you said culture is probably the best method of preservation. But still fallible, and this may be a good thing!
- mperham 3y agoI’m just trying to think what’s important enough to want to store forever.
- magic_hamster 3y agoI don't like this article. Especially the section titled "what is Nanofiche" which then lists some information about the pyramids and volatility of digital information with no mention of what Nanofiche is (although it is explained elsewhere). Plus there's no mention of how do you actually retrieve the archived information. Microfiche was developed alongside machines for scanning and retrieving data with some efficiency (despite being a mostly manual process). Nanofiche has no such proposition except sort of leaving the reader to visualize themselves over some kind of microscope.
- xctr94 3y ago“How long does Nanofiche last?” Proceeds to write 2 paragraphs that don’t answer the question.
- Animats 3y agoThis would be more useful if you could buy a device that writes it. I had to go look up the patents. It's a process similar to the way stamped Blu-Ray and DVDs are made. There's a laser process to make the stamping die, then a stamping process for production. Could this be done in one step?
- seanhunter 3y agoYou have to be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims they are doing something for the good of humanity but then gates their tech behind a patent.
- xeyownt 3y agoThat's a tradeoff, 20 years protection vs 50 000 000 years protection.
- amtamt 3y ago> For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets?
- nielsbot 3y agoGuess you could include instructions for building the right gear on a larger version of nanofiche, readable with the unaided eye... (1m x 1m?)
- mlyle 3y ago> How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets? ~.1 micron. Pretty small feature size. Typical letters might be 30 by 15 dots in a 10pt font with their 150DPI assumption. But it's not -that- exotic. A cheap compound optical microscope might do .4 micron, resulting in letters being 8 times and 4 times the spatial resolution. This is in the range where things are slightly annoying in fuzziness but still easily legible. My crappy LCD microscope for my classroom cost about $50 and has a resolution of roughly 1 micron. It could probably read, with difficulty, 12pt text.
- jiveturkey 3y agoit just needs analog magnification, so very achievable. i'm more worried about how scratch or defect resistant it is, given the small feature size. if you have to store it in some kind of case to protect against scratches, then how long does the case last? do you have to do this in ultra clean room conditions, to prevent fungus etc from being encased with it?
- TheMode 3y agoHow expensive is it to produce? Is it overwritable?
- xeyownt 3y agoNow vacuum cleaners will become weapons of massive destruction!
- silenced_trope 3y agoIn the book "Death's End" by Cixin Liu, the final book of the "Three Body Problem" trilogy - they explore the problem of data storage that has to last for millions of years. In their case they end up having a "Museum of Humanity" that exists in man-made caves in Pluto specifically meant to merely have information carved into the walls as all digital and other physical formats weren't deemed sufficient. I suspect these data formats are similarly not sufficient.
- elcritch 3y agoThat portion of the books didn’t seem too well reasoned. Digital encoding with high redundancy error correction and carved into walls would be superior to analog encodings for long term archival IMHO. Though more difficult to decode, any aliens advanced enough to reach it could reverse engineer it.
- eternityforest 3y agoAnalog text is already very redundant in the same manner as digital ECC. Letters mostly are different from other letters, and usually a single corrupt letter is obvious and one can tell what the author meant. Digital ECC adds an extra layer, but analog text is still pretty good.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoThe neat thing about sci-fi is that they are fiction first and science second. This makes them enticing to enjoy but not mundanely realistic enough to be actual real life guidance. Good to keep in mind.
- FearNotDaniel 3y ago> We build and maintain ultra long-term data storage archives called Arch Libraries (pronounced “Ark”). It's hard to take someone seriously when they claim to be acting on behalf of all humanity then immediately does something as pretentious as this. Probably made for the same kind of elitist types who like to spit on you as they try to demonstrate how they can pronounce "LaTeX" correctly.
- colordrops 3y agoAnnoying yes, but if the technology works, who cares. Does it work though? I can't tell from this article.
- karg_kult 3y agoWhy not just store it on the cloud?
- grammers 3y agoNeat, I'm regularly impressed with what people come up with. I wish I'd have such smart ideas!
- kqr2 3y agoWhat other options are there? M-discs are supposed to last up to 1000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC