If you are really worried about readability 20 years down the line you will probably be fine with DVD or CD media. One of the big concerns is going to be hardware that far along. 20 years from now finding a DVD drive in a PC might be like looking for a good 8 track player today. Copying your data onto better present day media every 3-4 years might be one of your best bets across the board over a long period of time. If cost is a minimal object, a running 3-4 disk raid on a machine that is otherwise unused could theoretically run for decades just swapping out drives as they failed. Buy 10 extra drives to replace as failures occur and you won’t need to worry about being unable to aquire parts.
Until a controller card fails, or there’s a power surge, or the file system becomes hopelessly corrupted.
Tape can easily last decades if you are willing to pay for enterprise-class hardware and storage facilities. You have to be willing to spend the bucks, both up-front and in continuing maintenance, monitoring and support.
You know, I was just looking at this 286 in the corner, wondering if the ~15yo HD in it would actually function if I fired it up…
Anyhow, there’s always 3rd party storage… let others worry about data consistency, physical storage medium, backups, maintenance, etc.
Alternately, (waaaay alternately) this guy says he can store 256GB on a sheet of A4, and I know I own books older than 50 years printed on iffy paper and not stored particularly well, yet the text is perfectly legible.
The entire premise of reliably storing data for 20 years on a single medium is flawed.
Expect to renew your data every few years and suddenly instead of needing some weird (read expensive) UDO gizmo (and hoping Windows 2025 will have drivers for it), you can use whatever ordinary storage technology is current, which you’ll own anyway.
My advice:
Burn duplicate DVDs of different brands in burners of different brands, stored carefully & plan to do that 2-hour task again in 5 years. Repeat 4x. Problem solved.
I think your best bet would be harddrives. Even from old computers, you may even be able to get your hands on a 4 to 8 gb drive free if you look hard enough. Just make sure that you recopy when the eIDE interface goes away. A backup to DVD may be a good supplement.
Reminds me of an article in a popular science magazine, acid free paper and ink came second to stone as the best format for information to survive longest.
Although you didn’t mention it, the other thing to consider is whether the file formats will be readable decades from now, even if the storage media is still readable. You might read the Library of Congress website on digital preservation. It discusses things like appropriate file formats to use, but doesn’t go into the question of which storage media is best.
I don’t know why you dismiss burning CD’s and DVD’s as way too unreliable. If I were in your shoes, I would probably do some research as to what were the most reliable brands/manufacturers of DVD-ROMs and back up my data on a couple of different brands.
There are very few stone tablets around that are intact & readable. Most are broken into fragments. A whole lot more have been re-used, made into walls or building parts, or even sidewalks, which often makes them useless for ‘data storage’.
I think we have more data available from papyrus rolls and vellum documents than from stone tablets. Which may be because of their increased storage density compared to stone tablets; but that is an relevant part of ‘data storage’.
Just wanted to come in here and mention the Mitsumi Archival disks. Whether the data sheet is true or not, at least someone is thinking about it.
What I would do, personally, if it was really important data, is get two hard drives big enough to hold all the data. Put it on both. Every five years, buy a new hard drive, and copy all the data to it.
Store one in an airtight firesafe in the basement, store another in a friend’s house.
I hate to say this, but the most reliable long-term form of storage is good old ink and paper. Multiple copies, stored in a few different safe places, on acid-free, archival paper.
Yes, it takes up a lot of space. And, yes, it’s not too convenient to use. But if you really want to store the data forever and ever, it’s probably your best bet.
I would export the data in a text-mased XML format whose construction was documented (such as ODF)… and then inscribe the text photographically on metal sheets. I would choose a metal that doesn’t oxidise much. My first choice of metal, based on physical properties, would have been gold, but that has other drawbacks, so it’s out. I think I would choose aluminum.
I would also print the text on acid-free paper, and etch it into granite slabs.
When reading the data back in, the slabs or sheets could be photographed and OCRed, or typed in by hand if need be.
I would store multiple copies in multiple areas. Including the moon (covered by a couple of metres of regolith).
You could also say that in the future, we’ll burn all the paper we can find for heat. Is the ability to store them safely away from future vandalism an issue?
Waaaay indeed. His claims have been met with a good deal of very understandable skepticism:
Every now and again, someone comes along making outlandish claims about a phenomenal new data storage/compression technlogy that will revolutionise everything - it would be nice if this wasn’t just another one of them, but it looks like it is.
Assuming proper maintenance, no analog technology can compete with any digital technology, in the long run. Every medium has a finite lifespan (even if only limited by proton decay), and every medium is subject to calamity (fire, or scavengers using stone tablets in construction, or asteroid strikes). So for reliable long-term storage, you want to store copies of the data in multiple places (to protect against calamity), and periodically transfer it over to new media (to account for finite lifespan of the medium, and which also has the side benefit that you can take advantage of new technologies as they develop). So you need to make a lot of copies. But it’s not possible to make exact copies of analog media: Errors and noise creep in. With digital media, though, you can, and usually much easier than you can copy analog media at all.
Personally, if I wanted to store information for 20 years and make sure it could be accessed at the end, I would contact a company to archive and maintenance it for me.
I’m not sure what it would cost, or even which companies offer this service (I know Symantec is getting into this business), but that’s the way I would go. That way, you send it off and never have to worry about it again. If something goes wrong, you know who to point the finger at/sue.
Well… yeah, he’s full of crap. But paper (printed on with the right class of toner) is still extremely stable, and I’d say you could get in the high order of 10s of MB/page with reliable error correction if you tried.
If the quantity of data was low, and the requirement for absolute continued data integrity high (really, really high), I’d consider printing it out.
Hell, I made a hundred-or-so page GWBASIC program when I was in elementary school, and (despite my efforts at the time), a tragic mishap during an attempt at HD encryption combined with a lost/corrupted floppy mean that a 1/2" of dot-matrix fanfold is the only remaining copy of my early genius. If I’d had a laser printer instead of now fading ribbon ink, I’d say it could last decades more.
(Twas a choose-your-own-adventure RPG if you care. If you knew your Star Trek and James Bond, you coulda won. ;))
