10 ms·
Back up your precious files on ordinary paper
- fiatmoney 14y agoAnd printing in just 3-tone color potentially increases the information density by a factor of 8.
- SonicSoul 14y ago... at a cost of durability. Tho some sort of error recovery algorithm (along the lines of parity archive) could be used.. adding redundancy at a lower rate than what is gained from additional colors..
- duaneb 14y agoColor might be useful as redundancy: For example, one could read the data into HSV; the bit being stored could be replicated three times, once in Hue, once in Saturation, and once in Value. I'm not sure how practical this actually is, especially on the radical end of those values. Also, this kind of redundancy doesn't help against coffee spills, just printing errors, and not even well against those.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jws 14y agoThree color will take three times as many bits as input and store three times as many bits. Each pixel cell will have eight possible values, but that is just three times the information.
- gus_massa 14y agoThe color of the ink usually changes much faster, so it could be a problem to try to read it later. If the information is stored digitally, probably it is still possible to read it with the right calibration. But if the information is stored analogously it is really a big problem: for example http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/savingstarwars.html http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/savingstarwars.html
- trebor 14y agoI can imagine how difficult source control would be when using paper: "Hey Fred, I need sheet 7 thru 9 from revision 2.6.3!" "Which filing cabinet is it in?"
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoSo a bit like backup tapes, then? ;)
- trebor 14y agoYup, like a cassette with its tape spilling out. Just imagine dropping the sheaf of papers on your way to the scanner!
- pavel_lishin 14y agoHopefully the papers would have some sort of index on them, so that the order in which they were scanned would be irrelevant. Then again, punch cards didn't.
- Retric 14y agoPunch cards were generally created by hand so the ability to cut and paste new punch cards was considered a significant advantage. This on the other hand is created by a computer and not human readable so a simple index is easy enough to add.
- jeltz 14y agoActually punch cards could have indexes. Several programming languages did not not use the last columns of the cards and reserved them for a number which could be used by card sorting machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorter
- pm24601 14y agoPunch cards were not that hard to sort after dropping them. Once you have a deck, draw some thing on the deck edges with a permanent marker making sure that all the card edges have been marked. If the deck is dropped, first of all it doesn't usually scatter that much (cards tend to stick to neighbor) and the marks on the edge help visually sort the deck pretty fast.
- mxey 14y agoSimilar project: https://github.com/penma/dpaper https://github.com/penma/dpaper
- femto 14y agoAnd this: http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/ http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/ Checkout the nice picture on their home page: http://twibright.com/ http://twibright.com/ :-)
- darkstalker 14y agoI heard someone did this years ago, but with the intention of sending files via fax
- e1ven 14y agoDo you recall the name of the project? I'm very interested in finding alternative implementations of this.
- nodata 14y agoThis is similar to "Paperkey - an OpenPGP key archiver": http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/ http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/
- miahi 14y agoDan has a nice article about this: http://www.dansdata.com/gz094.htm http://www.dansdata.com/gz094.htm
- tcarnell 14y agoSurely if you can use colour aswell you could store LOADS more data per A4 sheet than 80 Meg...
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI would be worried about yellow inks fading into white.
- pattern 14y agoNo one ever said yellow :) Cyan/Magenta/Green or any other trio of darker and differentiated colors may be able to do the trick.
- rm999 14y agoGood idea, but that may introduce some really thorny issues with color calibration.
- mjn 14y agoAlso, potential data-corruption issues with color laser printers that add spurious yellow watermarking dots [1], though perhaps a sufficiently robust error-correction scheme would be able to work around that. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography
- mherdeg 14y agoDoes anyone have a PDF of the source code? (Edit: well, good luck, folks: http://web.mit.edu/~mherdeg/www/paperbak.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~mherdeg/www/paperbak.pdf)
- DLWormwood 14y agoThis encoding system kind of reminds me of how the Nintendo eReader worked... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader
- cianclarke 14y agoPlease tell me this is a troll? I mean, I know the author acknowledges the fact this is completely unnecessary, but still - I'm no environmentalist, but this seems to be an incredibly silly idea..
- DanBC 14y agoLess of a troll and more of a playful look at barcode style systems, including byte encoding, compression, error correction, format limitations,etc. As the author says it's useful for a small number of very important files.
- vidarh 14y agoThe very first line of the page introduces it as a joke
- wtvanhest 14y agoGood catch, I didn't notice that at all.
- cantrevealname 14y agoThe author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so. I looked at the source code. It's 5,575 lines of original C code. (I excluded the AES encryption, bzip2, Reed-Solomon, and CRC16 source code from my count.) I imagine that he wrote the words "open source joke" as a defense mechanism against people who would mock his efforts with lines like "please tell me this is a troll", "that is completely unnecessary", and "an incredibly silly idea". Lots of people make self-effacing remarks when they introduce a work that they know will draw criticism: "It's just a first draft, it needs a lot more work." "I hacked it up during lunch [when it really took two weeks]." Etc.
- geon 14y ago> The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so. Possibly not a joke per se. But have you never written something substantial just for fun?
- ehutch79 14y agoi thought we were supposed to be scanning all our important documents and shredding them?
- roqetman 14y agoI guess this would be useful in the case of an apocalypse scenario involving mass EM pulses (assuming anyone is still around to build new computers with OCR to reload the code). Better use good acid-fee paper stored at near-vacuum though.
- happywolf 14y agoIf I can find a computer survived the EM pulses to scan the paper, then most likely I don't need this paper back up anyway. On the other hand if all my data is dead upon the EM pulses attack, I won't put too much faith on the chance of getting hold of any surviving computer.
- politician 14y agoWell, you could house your precious scanner in a Faraday cage along with a RepRap and other "reboot the world" tech.
- thebigshane 14y agoPlease elaborate; I'm intrigued... A Faraday cage will protect against an EM pulse? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage RepRap is a self-reproducible 3D printer? http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap And so with the RepRap (and some power source/converter) inside a faraday cage (with other physical protections as well), you're saying that this is the ultimate backup system for worst case scenarios? Do you have any links to provide more information about such a setup?
- vacri 14y agoYou seem to have answered your own questions. Yes, the Faraday cage protects against EM interference. But so does turning your computer off. Your main computer is fried? Pull out your old laptop and dust it off...
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- mmahemoff 14y ago"bitmaps produced by PaperBack are also human-readable (with the small help of any decent microscope). I'm joking" Actually, tiny human-readable text is incredibly useful for verifying the data was backed up correctly (at least for text-based files). I read about this paper backup technique a while ago, and that was touted as one of the main benefits.
- stephengillie 14y agoSounds like microfiche
- mmahemoff 14y agoTrue, the one I read about was paper based though, from a regular printer I believe.
- gmaslov 14y agoReminds me of a proposal I read about once for a time capsule -- the kind intended to survive the fall of civilization and to help reboot it. It would be plain human-readable text and diagrams engraved into a hard disc of some stable material, starting out big and legible at the edges and gradually getting smaller and smaller as it spirals towards the center, until it's microscopic. The text would start out as a Rosetta Stone type of thing, to try to establish a common language. Then as it got smaller, it would describe how to grind a hand lens so you can read further. Then even smaller text describes how to build a microscope. Maybe somewhat further on it talks about CD-ROM drives, and eventually transitions to /that/ format...
- dandelany 14y agoYou're probably thinking of the Rosetta Project: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ ...I always thought it was a very cool idea too.
- loceng 14y agoI just thought about this today. Worse case scenarios don't seem probable, though how devastated and delayed would life become if it did happen?
- slantyyz 14y agoI don't know how many people remember this, but this reminds me of a technology in the mid-to-early 80s where computer magazines offered a gigantic QR-like code that could be scanned (if you bought the device) so that you wouldn't have to spend any time typing in the BASIC source code.
- Gormo 14y agoOscar Databar: http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/oscar/oscar.html http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/oscar/oscar.html Software was published via standard one-dimensional bar codes, and instead of typing in the code from a book or magazine, you'd manually scan line after line of barcodes using a specially designed hand scanner.
- slantyyz 14y agoThat's a good find. The one I was thinking about that appeared in Apple ][ mags was the Cauzin Softstrip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip
- raverbashing 14y agoThis reminds me of one thing There was this small Casio musical keyboard at home, bought in the 80s (made in Japan I think) It came with a scanning pen, you could scan a song (from a book) made up of several barcodes (just like the links posted here) and it would play the song.
- kabdib 14y agoBaking informaiton into clay tablets isprobably the best bit-per-year-of-rentention technique that mankind has invented. Not sure what's second best -- ink on archival paper? [I don't count the recordings attached to the Voyager probes. We can't easily retrieve those.]
- aristus 14y agoYep. Though I recommend also creating a network of archives.. http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html
- justincormack 14y agoAre you sure? How many of the clay tablets made did not survive? Just because you have an old one with data does not make it effective retention. Engraving data on diamonds is probably better...
- Dylan16807 14y agoIf the room the clay tablet is in survives, the clay tablet survives. You can't say the same about hard drives and burned DVDs. Pressed DVDs are probably fine though.
- phillmv 14y agoAcid free archival paper kept in a dark, fire proof box is to my knowledge the single best technology we've invented and easily at our disposal for long-term storage. I think I might totally start 'printing out' photos I want to theoretically have available in fifty years and place them in a safety deposit box…
- pm24601 14y agoVery true. Acid-free paper has a expected life of over 1000 years. Think about how long paper documents like the Magna Carta, ancient illuminated bibles from the 700's, Shakespeare's plays have survived without special climate-controlled environments. Also paper in bulk is hard to destroy. A stack of paper is pretty dense and can survive to some degree a house fire or flood.
- scraplab 14y agoI used to run backups onto VHS tapes using a PCI/ISA card adaptor. IIRC, you could get about 2GB on a tape, with a SVHS recorder, or 1GB on a normal drive. Something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid Of course, it was absolutely useless. Might as well have piped the data to /dev/null.
- Ingaz 14y agoVery funny. And not so impractical - send a letter with one side as description and other as full data. For backups I can imagine such situation: "OMG! My HDD crashed!!! Ha! No panic! I made backups! Now I just need to restore them from this bunch of scheets. And my restore program is on this sheet. Now .. Erm.. Hm.."
- goggles99 14y ago"Olly, the author of OllyDbg, presents his new open source joke" This page is 5 years old. Glad to see that it finally made it onto HackerNews.
- densh 14y ago> Redundancy helps to recover partially damaged data. Redundancy 1:5 means that for every 5 consecutive data blocks, if one block is completely unreadable, PaperBack will be able to restore it. To reduce damages caused by coffee pots and other common dangers, blocks are distributed around the page. Higher redundancy decreases page capacity but improves reliability. Please do study error correcting codes. Most of them can offer much better error correction with less overhead. Take a look at Wolfram's MathWorld article [1]. This topic is heavily covered in most information theory books. [1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Error-CorrectingCode.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Error-CorrectingCode.html
- maxerickson 14y agoThe page claims to implement Reed-Solomon error correction: http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#8 http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#8
- LVB 14y agoThe application allows you to select between 1:2 and 1:10 redundancy.