I store data on a HD then tuck it away for 50 years. Will I be able to access it?

[Shagnasty]

@Cartooniverse

Might I point out, addressing Shagnasty’s idea, that placing any magnetic data storage media in a safe deposit box is a jim dandy way to guarantee that it will be partially gone in 3 years, and nearly if not totally wiped clean within 10.

I have never seen a modern safe deposit box that was not steel, surrounded by steel. The background magnetic fields inherent in sheet steel will degauss your storage drive faster than you can say Thomas Alva Edison.

Cartooniverse

If that is correct, I thank you. I wasn’t just talking, I just bought an extra external hard drive that I planned on making an archival backup with and putting into some type of safe storage. I was going to get a safe deposit box anyway and figured that would be a good place. Any ideas now? Homes and family have proved themselves very transient and I want to protect against a house fire. I do some internet backups but that is still too expensive for high bandwidth storage and leaves it in the hands of someone that could go poof.

A good business model for a company that doesn’t really exist is guaranteed archival storage for the long term like a cryogenics lab. Translation from old media formats could be a service as well. Might be a niche market but some people may want it.

I am sure that incremental transfers are the only way to go. Cost per gigabyte is way less than $1 at this point and it will only get cheaper and easier. Today’s solution is get a backup external hard drive for $100 or so (standard ones are just commodity hard drives with a case around them so they aren’t much different in terms of long-term quality), put it into safe storage and pull it out again in 5 years to use whatever is best then. Within ten years, we will be able to burn an incredible amount of data on one DVD looking thing and we can make as many backups as we want and perhaps wait ten years.

[Dewey_Finn]

@rbroome

Paper, especially acid-free paper, is hands down the most long-lasting storage medium available. Nothing else comes close.

As sturmhauke suggested, there are better choices than paper. The Rosetta Project is using a three-inch nickel disk that’s etched with tiny, tiny text containing part of Genesis translated into hundreds of languages. The idea is that no matter what happens with digital storage media, people will always be able to use some sort of magnifying device to read it, even thousands of years into the future.

This is impractical for Uncommon Sense to store his videos and photos, but for really long-term storage, etched metal might be best.

[Frylock]

@Shagnasty

By then, there will be quantum computers that can solve an almost inifinite number of problems at once. They will be so powerful that we will only need like 5 for the whole world. There won’t be a home market at all because nobody needs computers like that at their house.

I take it this was tongue in cheek, referencing things that were said about contemporary computers 25 years ago, right?

Just making sure I’m not reading a joke where none was written.

-FrL-

[Q.E.D]

@Cartooniverse

Might I point out, addressing Shagnasty’s idea, that placing any magnetic data storage media in a safe deposit box is a jim dandy way to guarantee that it will be partially gone in 3 years, and nearly if not totally wiped clean within 10.

I have never seen a modern safe deposit box that was not steel, surrounded by steel. The background magnetic fields inherent in sheet steel will degauss your storage drive faster than you can say Thomas Alva Edison.

Yeah, you’re going to need to cite that for me. I can find dozens and dozens of authoritative articles which recommend storing backup magnetic media in a safe-deposit box. But none that make the claim you do.

Sorry, but it sounds like BS to me. I’ve been around computers a lot of years, and I’ve never once heard that storing magnetic media in a safe-deposit box was a bad idea–other than issues of immediate accessibility.

[astro]

@Q.E.D.

Yeah, you’re going to need to cite that for me. I can find dozens and dozens of authoritative articles which recommend storing backup magnetic media in a safe-deposit box. But none that make the claim you do.

Sorry, but it sounds like BS to me. I’ve been around computers a lot of years, and I’ve never once heard that storing magnetic media in a safe-deposit box was a bad idea–other than issues of immediate accessibility.

These people will have some ‘splainin’ to do!

[Q.E.D]

@astro

These people will have some ‘splainin’ to do!

Heh. Not to mention that almost every PC case I’ve ever seen was made of stamped sheet steel. I would have thought if that was a problem, someone would have noticed by now.

[Shagnasty]

@Frylock

I take it this was tongue in cheek, referencing things that were said about contemporary computers 25 years ago, right?

Just making sure I’m not reading a joke where none was written.

-FrL-

Correct. Half the people on the boards probably think I am an idiot from not getting stuff I say like that.

[Cartooniverse]

@Q.E.D.

Yeah, you’re going to need to cite that for me. I can find dozens and dozens of authoritative articles which recommend storing backup magnetic media in a safe-deposit box. But none that make the claim you do.

Sorry, but it sounds like BS to me. I’ve been around computers a lot of years, and I’ve never once heard that storing magnetic media in a safe-deposit box was a bad idea–other than issues of immediate accessibility.

Fair enough, lemme look around. This fear comes from an uncle who is/was a true Guru in early computer software and hardware testing. It also comes from plenty of television tape ops showing me wooden shelves, and admonishing me for putting my videotapes on steel shelves.

I’ll look for a cite- or, of course, apologize and say it was just IMHO and not a fact.

[Q.E.D]

@Cartooniverse

I’ll look for a cite- or, of course, apologize and say it was just IMHO and not a fact.

Eh, no problem. I was curious where you’d gotten this information from, since I’ve never heard this before. Some steels certainly can hold a residual magnetic field, others cannot, such as certain stainless steel alloys. I have no idea of the composition of bank vaults and deposit boxes. Even if it can remain magnetized after forming and, if applicable, heat treatment it would have to be a pretty strong field to be worrisome. For typical floppies, for example, the field would have to be at least 50 Oersteds, if not higher. Anything made of ferromagnetic metals and alloys would be sticking to the sides of the box if it was anywhere near that strong, I suspect.

So, yeah, if your paper clips stick to the side of the box, don’t put your magnetic backup media in there.

[AHunter3]

Your hypothetical futuristic computer most likely won’t give a shit if your storage-device-from-the-past is a winchester-mechanism electromagnetic storage device, an optical drive device, or a punch-card reader. If the device-from-the-past conforms to some loose and general standards, a generic storage-device driver and an industry-standard type of attachment interface will ensure that it will work.

There has never been enough call for access to punch-card data for anyone to cobble together a SCSI, USB, FireWire, ATA, or Bluetooth punchcard reader, but if someone were making one now they’d probably design it with enough hardware abstraction that the computer could treat it as akin to any other external removable-storage device without you having to install new drivers for it.

And once they did so, most future computer hardware + operating systems would be able to attach to it and read from it even if SCSI, FireWire, ATA, etc, become obsolete. For the same reason that I can take out my old SyQuest 200 MB drive, attach a FireWire-to-SCSI converter to my FireWire port, and plug the SyQuest device in, and pop in a 5.25" SyQuest disk and have it appear on my OS X Desktop. Likewise for a 21 MB Floptical drive + disk. Likewise for a Bernoulli drive and disk. Unlike, say, the floppy disk drive hardware used for those old 5.25" PC floppies in the early 80s, these devices all conform to a general standard for storage devices and they “just work” without specialized drivers.

Storage media that dates back far enough that mainstream computer-penetration was low? Probably not. I wouldn’t put odds on being able to read an 8 inch floppy with any modern computer, not because it couldn’t be done but because of the scarcity of 8 inch floppies with data that anyone cares about, ergo no demand for it. But there’s a hell of a lot of information on ATA or SCSI hard drives, and the electronics that read them mostly “run themselves” and/or interact with the operating system in extremely standardized ways.

The computer of the future may not come with the ability to attach and read 50-year-old hard drives (although it might), or it might be the 2056ish equivalent of running down to CompUSA or BestBuy and buying one, or it might be the 2056ish equivalent of browsing more esoteric parts stores for things that are seldom needed or used. My guess is the CompUSA scenario is most likely. Hard drives as we know them have been in use for 30 years already, what’s another 50 more?

[yoyodyne]

There are amazingly strong rare earth magnets inside of hard drives that are used to position the read/write heads and they have no effect on the data. It isn’t possible that storage of a drive in a steel box would have any effect.

[Q.E.D]

@yoyodyne

There are amazingly strong rare earth magnets inside of hard drives that are used to position the read/write heads and they have no effect on the data.

Yes, but they are arranged so that the magnetic field is almost entirely contained between them. The only part of the drive actually exposed to the full strength of the field is the voice coil on the head arm. If the platters actually spun through that field, your data wouldn’t last very long.

[Catalyst]

@AHunter3

There has never been enough call for access to punch-card data for anyone to cobble together a SCSI, USB, FireWire, ATA, or Bluetooth punchcard reader, but if someone were making one now they’d probably design it with enough hardware abstraction that the computer could treat it as akin to any other external removable-storage device without you having to install new drivers for it.

Actually, you can buy punchcard readers that’ll connect to a serial port on a PC. Serial ports are being phased out, but, as you mention, a simple converter solves that problem.

[tygerbryght]

Lotsa people have made allegations and suggestions. I wouldn’t even begin to try to evaluate the merits of any versus the others. What I will say is, if it were me, here’s what I’d do:

I’d burn the data (photos, whatever) to a DVD, but wait until a standard is agreed to for HD (there are two right now, and nobody without a time machine can really say which one will win). And then I’d go back every ten years (that gives time for things to change, but not time for the obsolete - which whatever you choose now will be, probably long before then - method to become really hard to convert) and convert that priceless data to the latest standard (see above), and re-store for the next ten years. A decade is a reasonable period of time.

Using this method, the only thing you should have to worry about would be a Vinge-style singularity. :smack:

[tygerbryght]

I forgot to say that I’d also try really hard to find the absolute highest quality of blank media that are on the market. Cheap blank media is not a good thing, when you’re trying to preserve something for posterity.

[rbroome]

@Dewey Finn

As sturmhauke suggested, there are better choices than paper. The Rosetta Project is using a three-inch nickel disk that’s etched with tiny, tiny text containing part of Genesis translated into hundreds of languages. The idea is that no matter what happens with digital storage media, people will always be able to use some sort of magnifying device to read it, even thousands of years into the future.

This is impractical for Uncommon Sense to store his videos and photos, but for really long-term storage, etched metal might be best.

OK----OK
There are more long-lasting media than paper. But from a cost-benefit ratio, paper is still the practical way to store large amounts of data for long periods of time. The resolution of stone is pretty low and the cost of 3 in thick disk of nickel (why nickel?) is pretty high. So I am sticking with paper.

Of course, I NEVER store anything on paper-too hard to access. As has been amply pointed out, the practical way to store data for long periods of time is to keep rewriting it onto new media. Hopefully with overlap in the sense that the old records are still around for a few years after the new media are created-just in case you make a mistake and pick a dye-based CD for long-term storage or something.