Well maybe not microprinting, but really really small font sizes - how small can someone print a character on a 600dpi laser printer? The point here is to get a large database on a few sheets of paper as a backup in case all hell broke loose - you could only see the characters with a magnifying glass - but you could get a lot of pages of material on a single sheet of paper.
Is there a plug-in for office for this?
My searches on the web and on this board turned up nothing.
One solution depends on your printer capabilities: in the Epson bubble jets, for example, you go to the printer properties/advanced/printer/defaults menu, there is a nice feature that allows you the capability of printing 2 or more pages per sheet of paper of any document or web page.
I remember HP’s (both laser and bubble jet printers) can do it too, check the manual or printer properties.
I have found that four pages per sheet is still readable, my printer has the capability of printing 16 Pages per sheet! So YMMV. You should print and experiment until you find how many pages you can have per sheet and still be able to read it under a magnifying glass.
‘Small Fonts’ is readable at 6 pixels high. At 600 dpi, that’s 1/100 inch per character, so with no margins and no spacing between lines, you could theoretically fit 1100 lines of text on a page. But you’d definitely need a magnifying glass to read it, or perhaps a microscope.
If you wanted to do this seriously, you might look into some of Canon’s microfiche printer/readers. Of course, they’ll run about $2000. Maybe you can find a library that’s going out of business.
I’d recommend just burning a few CD-R disks, myself. The burner will run $120 or so, the disks in bulk are less than a dollar each. If you store the disks off-site and suffer a major disaster, you can be up and running in as little time as it takes for you to get a new computer and install your database software (copies of which should also be stored off-site).
The added bonus is that you can encrypt your files before you burn them, so even if your backup disks are stolen, no-one can read the files without the necessary passwords and such.
I can’t see any point to this. Paper is probably one of the worst supports, much more vulnerable to water and fire than most other computer supports. On top of that you would have to key in all the information again and having to read it with a magnifier would make it not worth while. On top of that you could only save text and numbers so any other files would have to be encoded to use strictly those characters. I cannot think of a worse choice. CD ROM, tape, floppies, anything, seems like a better way.
Anecdote: In Celestial Navigation there are some hard core traditionalists who want to convince others that you absolutely need astronav, at least as a backup because “GPS’s fail, calculators’ batteries die, etc while a sextant will always work and your tables need no batteries”. Never mind that for the price of one sextant you can buy six GPS receivers.
At any rate, some years ago I was in a car with a small group and we were driving to a boat we were going to sail. We were having the usual discussion about whether astronav is necessary or reliable and I was the one saying it may be a beautiful thing but it belongs in the past. When we got to the boat (which was not mine, it was the first time I was on it) the HO229 sight reduction tables (big tomes) were thoroughly soaked and completely unusable. Not to mention that for the price of the set of tables you can get a GPS.
Paper is not a good medium for safe storage of information.
Yes and no… It depends on your time-frame.
If you print something on (archive-type) paper with (appropriate longevity) ink, it will still be readable in quite a long time.
A CD-ROM with the same document on it, however, will surely not be readable (using commonly available hardware) in 50 years. Maybe not even in 10.
Just imagine what you would do if you got a stack of punch cards in the mail!
Read Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information(PDF) for a very well-researched foray into the subject of keeping data available.
He gives a very interresting account for how some of the data from the US 1960 census was almost lost, until a copy was found on microfiche.
But of course, if you’re only interested in making sure that your database would survive a fire, by all means burn it out to a CD (and make sure you can read it back, and store it in a safe place).
Ah, but here’s the critical difference. When CD-ROMs get replaced by something new (call it FutureDrive), people won’t automatically trash their old CD-ROM drives. There will be a period when computers will be equipped with CD-ROMs and FutureDrives, and copying your data from one medium to another will be a snap.
Making a paper copy is fine if you want to look up things quickly without having to boot up a computer, but the OP is contemplating a major crash. At that point, how do you get you paper-printed microtext back into the computer? You could retype it, a slow error-prone process, or you could try to OCR scan it, which will be extremely difficult with tiny text, even if you assume FutureScanners will be much better than current models.
A compact disk costs very little, weighs practically nothing, and takes up miniscule space in an off-site fireproof safe. Getting your business up and running after a major system crash is a cinch, and so what if FutureDrives come along? It’s not like they’ll be accompanied by FutureCops waving FutureGuns and ordering you to trash all your CD technology because it represents imperialist bourgeoius counter-revolutionary thinking.
Now, if you were dumb enough to trash your CD-ROM drives before copying over all your CD-stored records, then yer just shit outta luck. You should hang onto technology as long as it is useful, and only commit yourself to a changeover when you can do it completely in one don’t-look-back-or-you’ll-turn-into-a-pillar-of-salt swoop.
That said, I can understand making a micro-printed hard copy of a database if you were going on a business trip and wanted a quick’n’easy way to look up things, but as a backup method, it blows.
I wonder how accurately a 600 dpi printer can place those dots. A little jitter in pixels might not matter if you’re printing a picture or printing characters that are 100 pixels tall, but it might make 6 pixel tall characters unreadable. It’d probably be OK if the characters were, say, 12 pixels high.
The microfiche reader sounds like a good bet, but if you don’t want to spend $2000 you could try something similar with a 35mm camera. Print your pages as small as your printer allows, tape the sheets to the wall and take a picture. You could probably read the negatives directly with a microscope.
You’d have to experiment to determine how many pages you could shoot on each frame. Might not be more than four. I’d try it with indirect light, low speed film (for better resolution) and a tripod.
Two random thoughts that sort of relate to this thread:
When the NY Times decided to create their Millennium Time Capsule – to be opened something like 5000 years from now – they researched all the options for looooooongterm information storage. They concluded that physical storage (microengraving on an inert metal substrate, in their case) far outweighed any digital/electronic option. I believe that a microscope was included in the capsule too, for the hell of it.
I forget the whole backstory, but a few years ago there was the tale of some guy who was caught spying, selling secrets or extorting money from some high-security firm. (Like I said, I forget the backstory.)
Anyway, he was able to steal the entire database (or whatever) of the target entity. He successfully sidestepped all the ultrasophisticated anti-copying protections built into the computers at the “secure” facility where he worked; furthermore, he left no suspicious “trail” behind him after using those computers. How did he do it?
He merely videotaped the computer monitor as he scrolled from page to page and took the tape home in his briefcase.
Well you didn’t say whether the database needed to be very secure. The great thing about microprinting would be you could run off about a hundred copy and give them to a hundred different people. What are the chances that everyone of those hundred people were going to lose their copy ? It would be relatively cheap as well so if the database was just a collection of data that had no real value to anyone besides the company (nobody wants to steal it) why not just run off some hardcopy and give a copy to each employee for safekeeping.
One point that has been missed here is that I want a hard copy of the database - this is basically my entire career at stake, so I will make a daily backup, but in case all computers die, I want to have a tangible thing (in a fireproof box) that, if I needed to, I could rely on. I don’t need to be able to store it for 500 years - every day it will be updated!
>> The great thing about microprinting would be you could run off about a hundred copy and give them to a hundred different people. What are the chances that everyone of those hundred people were going to lose their copy ?
Rather, what are the chances of your finding people willing to securely store your shit?
>> It would be relatively cheap as well
I don’t think so. Printing is probably the most expensive way of saving information. For 30 cents you can print three pages or you can save 250,000 pages on a CD-ROM so the cost ratio is about 80,000. Now multiply that by the number of paper copies and the ratio is way over a million.
>> so if the database was just a collection of data that had no real value to anyone besides the company (nobody wants to steal it) why not just run off some hardcopy and give a copy to each employee for safekeeping.
Oh yeah, your employees will love you if you give them company documents for safekeeping at home. Great way to run a company too.
>> so I will make a daily backup, but in case all computers die, I want to have a tangible thing (in a fireproof box) that, if I needed to, I could rely on.
You mean all the computers in the world would die? In that case you are screwed no matter what and your paper copies are useless.
Daily backup on paper? In case you urgently need the information and all the computers in your area die? Dunno, but it sounds like someone asking what’s a good dinghy to have in your apartment in case the sink overflows. It makes no sense to me. If you are paranoid about having access to your information there are many ways of going about it but printing on paper doesn’t make any sense. American Express had most of their information in the WTC when it was hit and they were able to recover pretty quick. I can assure you they were not keeping the information on paper.
You can back up to another computer on another site, you can backup to CDs etc. but paper does not make any sense from any point of view.
Get a website and store your information there? You can upload to your site daily, the site’s server is elsewhere (usually several elsewheres), you can use appropriate security features to protect your information, and it’s fairly cheap.
With a standard 600 DPI HP laser I can easily print 3-4 point fonts in a line and spacing compressed format and still have the text be perfectly legible (with magnification). 6 points is about as small as I can comfortably read. Letter image sharpness and clarity starts to break down around 2 points or so, not because the laser engine can’t image letters that small, but due more to the physical limits of how effectively the toner can be fused to fiberous paper surface.
Re practical limits it’s pretty unlikely that transactional business information will retain current or practical importance beyond the estimated 50-100+ year lifetime of a burnable CDR or DVD. Unless these are legal documents or something that really needs to be preserved for the ages a CDR or DVD is more than sufficient and can easily be transferred to the latest and greatest format as newer and even more secure digital formats come along in the future. If paper is the choice because its relatively low tech retrievial nature will survive the social, economic and technological collapse of civilzation, I’d say there will more pressing issues at hand at that point than the security of your 2002 tax returns and accounts receivable info.
I managed to get my 600 DPI Laserjet to print lower than 6 points, as I recall only by creating the characters in Photoshop. They were legible with a magnifying glass, but not very readable.
I believe Laserjets can print exactly the same dots every time, to answer an earlier question. I was trying to fix a problem with a graphic, and was distressed to find that the same artifact appeared at the dot level even when I monkeyed around with several parameters.
An advantage of paper is that it can be signed, notarized, etc. I have not heard of that happening to a CD.
To get maximum “bang for the buck” there are printing techniques that print digital coding on paper. The amount of storage was quite staggering, something like 50 pages of regular text on one page. (Sorry, I couldn’t find a cite.)
For storage safety, paper is superior against fire. Safes that are rated to store paper safely for an hour in a typical house fire will not store magnetic media, CDs, or photographs. That takes a considerably more expensive safe.
>> An advantage of paper is that it can be signed, notarized, etc. I have not heard of that happening to a CD.
You have to be kidding. You have seriously never heard of digital signatures?
>> To get maximum “bang for the buck” there are printing techniques that print digital coding on paper. The amount of storage was quite staggering, something like 50 pages of regular text on one page.
Which is still thousands of times more expensive than computer media and much more unreliable and onerous to recover the info.
>> Safes that are rated to store paper safely for an hour in a typical house fire will not store magnetic media, CDs, or photographs. That takes a considerably more expensive safe.
You would need over a million sheets of paper to store the information you can put on ten CDroms. I would bet I can find a cheaper safe to keep 10 CD roms than you can find to keep a million sheets of paper.
chique, I backup all my stuff to CDROM periodically but I have half a dozen files which I consider essential and those I encrypt and upload to a Net server periodically so that even if my computer and backups all were destroyed I’d still have access to the info. But there’s no limit to how paranoid you can get. What if My computer was destroyed, the backup CDROMS I have at home were destroyed, the Backups I have in my other place were destroyed and the Yahoo server where I keep my backups were also destroyed? At that point it would seem we are in the midst of WWIII and this would be the least of my worries but I still think having backup on paper is not an efficient way of doing it.
Suppose your entire building collapses in a tornado and everything is soaked in torrential rain. Or suppose the building is destroyed in a flood. What are the chances of recovering the information stored on millions of sheets of paper? And yet you can put ten CDroms in a small steel box and your chances of recovering the information are immensely better.
sailor, last time I checked there are all kinds of photographic and digital media that are not accepted in a court of law. Or only permited in limited conditions. A business wants to be able to defend itself in a lawsuit.
As I said, I haven’t heard of a CD being notarized.
A 100,000 sheets on one 650 MB CD? Ahem. I have documents in PageMaker that take up 40MB for 100 pages. So we’re talking about a couple thousand pages of that type. Then, if one throws in documents that include gif illustrations and the like, well, I have a novel which takes up most of a CD. It’s quite practical to store a paper copy. I wouldn’t be without it. I want both.
partly_warmer, this is getting to be silly, Yes, I guess you could contrive a situation where having backups on paper would be useful but not in practical situations.
>> A business wants to be able to defend itself in a lawsuit.
Note that the OP talks about making a backup of computer data on paper. If the data is in computer media to begin with, putting it on paper does not make it any more acceptable to anyone. So don’t change the OP which is about backing up computer data to paper.
Backing up computer data on paper makes no sense no matter which way you look at it and I challenge you to find anyone who does it. Find me one single company who backs up their data to paper.
>> As I said, I haven’t heard of a CD being notarized
Which just shows you don’t know what’s going on in the real world because digital signatures, including digital signatures by notaries are legally accepted in most of the developed world, including the US. If you did a Net search you would find lots of information but you prefer to let me do it:
http://www.ss.ca.gov/digsig/regulations.htm
http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ecommerce/legal/digital.html
http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/ecommerce/pki/pki.html
http://www.surety.com/ = digital notary service
Search for digital signatures and you’ll find plenty. And you can be sure that your purchases online are valid contracts.
But let’s get back to the OP which is about making backups of computer data on paper. It is not practical no matter how you look at it. You are just contriving scenarios which could, conceivably, make it practical. No one does it and there’s a good reason.
Using Pagemaker formatted docs as a reference for how efficiently a typical page of text and numbers can be saved in a digital file format as a standard compressed backup file is not really a very useful metric if were talking text based business docs. Standard text is very compressible.
As a rough example a 1112 page (in word) 12 point font, single spaced etext copy of Clavell’s “Shogun” compresses to 927K with standard zip compression from an original file size of 2438K as a standard ascii text document.
A standard 700 meg CDR can store approx 757 copies of this or
84,784 pages. It’s not quite 100,000 pages, and it doesn’t take pics into account, but as a rough real world estimate it’s a lot closer than your Pagemaker example for storing standard text and numbers business info.