8 ms·

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. What would be absolutely fascin

by zach 14y ago

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics. Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.

natep 14y ago
> Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot. As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?).
- jaggederest 14y ago
  To be fair, if improvements in hardware and software continue at the rate they have been, or some moderate percentage thereof, in 100 years it will be no problem to trawl a few exabytes of data for anything interesting.
  - sp332 14y ago
    There's a blog that's analyzing Geocities, that's about 1 terabyte of 1 KB files. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ The analysis tracks changes in template design, follows modifications to logos and gifs, and unearths collections of shrines to dead children etc. But that's from when it was harder to make and upload data, so people only put meaningful (to them) stuff online. These days we'd have a hundred thousand copies of a few popular MP3's and everyone's crappy digital photos. The percentage of meaningful stuff would be a lot lower.
- bradfa 14y ago
  As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?) I'd store my pictures there. Finding old pictures of grandparents when they were little, or even older stuff, is amazing. Wouldn't it be cool if my descendants could still look at pictures of my family in 100 years? Provided that downloading from this 100 year store is something I could do X times per year, and so long as I could append more data to it over time, it's an interesting business model.
simonw 14y ago
I really want that service.
arethuza 14y ago
"Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years" I'm not sure what kind of organisation I'd actually trust to store data for that length of time - a commercial organisation is probably going to be more effective at providing service but what commercial organisation would you trust to provide consistent service for 100 years? A Swiss bank perhaps? Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this (clearly they store data for much longer times) but aren't set up to provide customer service.
- sspiff 14y ago
  Exactly. I doubt Amazon will be around for another century, but even if they do survive, their services won't be the same for that long...
- zach 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm kind of wondering the same thing. It's certainly the kind of timeframe that changes your perspective. Maybe a tiny bit of Danny Hillis rubbed off on me from working at Applied Minds (man, I sure hope so!) Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) have entered our economy, that's a question begging to be answered. Amazon at least seems to be an "eventually durable" datastore, though. Meaning that if you are told in the future that it will go offline, you have an excellent chance to make other suitable arrangements. Say there's a 0.01% chance of this product being discontinued next year, up to a 10% chance 5 years from now. I have to think there will almost certainly be other services you can move your data to, on similar terms, for a long time. That's assuming you're around at all, and nothing reeeeeally bad happens even so. Making data last after your death (or even after you stop paying!) is a lot harder in this environment, and achieving true 100-year durability is a tough nut indeed. I like your bank idea, since the preservation of a bank account is just a specialized simple case of data preservation. Data preservation seems rather more reliable when the data is directly attached to money. Then again, maybe banks themselves are on their way out for this purpose — Dropbox could become the new safety-deposit box. But there are 100-year domain registrations, after all. Maybe we're ready for organizations to at least offer 100-year storage, too.
pnathan 14y ago
This seems like a very interesting business idea. It'd require some level of initial operating capital and a relatively competent server farm team, but I don't think it'd have to be fancy. "Long Data, LLC... We secure your data for the long-term".
tedunangst 14y ago
If you really wanted to preserve something, I'd consider printing it on gold leaf. One gram of gold turns into about 4 sq ft, and assuming we can print at 1200dpi, we'd have 4 x 144 x 1200 x 1200 bits, or about 100 megabytes. So you'd need about ten grams, at a price of $530 or so, plus storage. Though you could just bury it in your backyard.
sintaks 14y ago
Data cryonics indeed. One of the early names kicked around (and, indeed, its working name for over a year) was Cold Storage.

by zach 14y ago

natep 14y ago

> Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot. As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?).

jaggederest 14y ago
To be fair, if improvements in hardware and software continue at the rate they have been, or some moderate percentage thereof, in 100 years it will be no problem to trawl a few exabytes of data for anything interesting.
- sp332 14y ago
  There's a blog that's analyzing Geocities, that's about 1 terabyte of 1 KB files. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ The analysis tracks changes in template design, follows modifications to logos and gifs, and unearths collections of shrines to dead children etc. But that's from when it was harder to make and upload data, so people only put meaningful (to them) stuff online. These days we'd have a hundred thousand copies of a few popular MP3's and everyone's crappy digital photos. The percentage of meaningful stuff would be a lot lower.
bradfa 14y ago
As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?) I'd store my pictures there. Finding old pictures of grandparents when they were little, or even older stuff, is amazing. Wouldn't it be cool if my descendants could still look at pictures of my family in 100 years? Provided that downloading from this 100 year store is something I could do X times per year, and so long as I could append more data to it over time, it's an interesting business model.

simonw 14y ago

I really want that service.

arethuza 14y ago

"Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years" I'm not sure what kind of organisation I'd actually trust to store data for that length of time - a commercial organisation is probably going to be more effective at providing service but what commercial organisation would you trust to provide consistent service for 100 years? A Swiss bank perhaps? Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this (clearly they store data for much longer times) but aren't set up to provide customer service.

sspiff 14y ago
Exactly. I doubt Amazon will be around for another century, but even if they do survive, their services won't be the same for that long...
zach 14y ago
Yeah, I'm kind of wondering the same thing. It's certainly the kind of timeframe that changes your perspective. Maybe a tiny bit of Danny Hillis rubbed off on me from working at Applied Minds (man, I sure hope so!) Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) have entered our economy, that's a question begging to be answered. Amazon at least seems to be an "eventually durable" datastore, though. Meaning that if you are told in the future that it will go offline, you have an excellent chance to make other suitable arrangements. Say there's a 0.01% chance of this product being discontinued next year, up to a 10% chance 5 years from now. I have to think there will almost certainly be other services you can move your data to, on similar terms, for a long time. That's assuming you're around at all, and nothing reeeeeally bad happens even so. Making data last after your death (or even after you stop paying!) is a lot harder in this environment, and achieving true 100-year durability is a tough nut indeed. I like your bank idea, since the preservation of a bank account is just a specialized simple case of data preservation. Data preservation seems rather more reliable when the data is directly attached to money. Then again, maybe banks themselves are on their way out for this purpose — Dropbox could become the new safety-deposit box. But there are 100-year domain registrations, after all. Maybe we're ready for organizations to at least offer 100-year storage, too.

pnathan 14y ago

This seems like a very interesting business idea. It'd require some level of initial operating capital and a relatively competent server farm team, but I don't think it'd have to be fancy. "Long Data, LLC... We secure your data for the long-term".

tedunangst 14y ago

If you really wanted to preserve something, I'd consider printing it on gold leaf. One gram of gold turns into about 4 sq ft, and assuming we can print at 1200dpi, we'd have 4 x 144 x 1200 x 1200 bits, or about 100 megabytes. So you'd need about ten grams, at a price of $530 or so, plus storage. Though you could just bury it in your backyard.

sintaks 14y ago

Data cryonics indeed. One of the early names kicked around (and, indeed, its working name for over a year) was Cold Storage.