Suppose a little magnetar floats by, a little too close to earth, and under its malign magnetic influence all data were to be erased… hard disks, tapes, everything that depended on magnetic persistence. The civilization is suddenly and completely blinded of its (magentic) data.
A true catastrophe. Society grinds to a halt. But since I cannot worry about everything at once, initially I only choose to worry about my little stash in the bank. Multiple banks, actually. Is there a way I can recover my life’s savings, and the little gold I have squirreled away in a locker somewhere, given that all magnetic data stores have been wiped out or corrupted?
With my moolah safely stacked up in my bedroom, I can then start worrying about other important things, such as Walmart running out of toilet paper.
BTW, is there any hope of eventually recovering some data of value, or do we start over on a clean disk drive? Maybe this time we will invent non-magnetic optical storage instead. But suppose there was a little supernova nearby…
WAG Large banks and other large corporations are likely well into the process of transitioning to SSD storage which is not vulnerable to damage or corruption by magnetic fields. However, a strong magnetic field could still screw with the cooling system, e.g. fans, pumps for liquid cooling systems, etc.
I work in risk management for a large bank that you’ve heard of.
I’m not aware of any large initiatives to transition from spinning drives for online storage or mag tape for offline storage. I’m sure someone in network engineering has counted it up and has a better answer, buy I’d wager we have exabytes, if not zettabytes of data (or at least disk space) worldwide.
Converting any operationally useful portion of this to SSD will be immensely expensive, and the relatively small number of read/write cycles you can do on SSD vs disk is a big limitation. SSD is getting more reliable, but the stuff does wear out and it behaves a bit differently than magnetic disks, especially in failure. Spinning disks generally will let you know of impending doom with increased read times or increased error correction activity on reads or writes. SSD has a way of just going poof.
I’d be much more worried about the riots that will happen once people realize what “fiat currency” means and that any money they had is now just a distant memory.
Hopefully, it goes without saying that this is purely the musings of a geek and in no way reflects the operational status, opinions, plans or policies of my employer.
I’d be more worried about the gravity of a body that has more mass than the sun wandering close enough to the solar system to cause serious issues. Just using the wikipedia article on magnetars
Something with the mass greater than the sun, spitting out high doses of gamma and x-ray radiation, even out at the distance of the moon… you’re banking records are the least of your worries.
Even if it didn’t kill us directly, the computers running our nuclear power plants, our electricity grid, our traffic, our cars, and Og knows what else will crash for good, since their OS would be trashed. You’d never even get to the bank. Or make a phone call.
If you don’t want to consider the larger life and death implications of the OP’s scenario, how about this: anarchist hackers send viruses to all the major banks, sort of like the ransomware going around, except it just bricks computers instead of holding them hostage.
(I’m actually surprised no one’s trying to do this right now with SOMEONE, actually.)
Leaper, I assume that ‘sneaker-gap’ backup procedures are in place that could mitigate that scenario. Let me replace ‘assume’ with ‘hope to God’. I back stuff up, and I’m no bank.
I work for small government, and I believe we still have a ‘sneaker’ net backup in place. If for instance, in case a building burns down. We push a copy of our backups out to another site. We do keep the back ups in steel safes in halon protected server rooms. Not sure if that would help from a massive EMP, or magnetron. But the data is pretty safe.
In the case of losing all data stored in the world, well, money and gold isn’t going to help you much. Oh, maybe for a few days, but people will quickly realize that it’s worthless compared to bread and water.
The various governments all basically agree to establish either a temporary fiat currency or a loose policy with real currency. The effect of which is to back up banks with a blank check, let ordinary citizens continue to spend the money they think they have and to reaffirm their various debts and assets with each other.
So there’s a short-term where no one is really sure what’s going on, but government powers are insisting that it’ll all be OK if you just keep accepting cash and checks. Since most people will be seriously up a creek if this doesn’t happen, most will go along.
In the end, the final assets and debts are settled through government programs that essentially ask you to prove what you owned, first relying on paper documents and second relying on “what seems right.” The government will heavily subsidize this process because they’d rather have a few bad apples take advantage of it than to have civilization completely collapse.
After a period of years or even decades, some of these issues may still be in the process of being resolved through the courts, especially when it comes to people with the biggest claims and the most questionable records.
I’m not saying this won’t be a grade-A catastrophe… but let’s be realistic, most of us in modern society can find at least some paperwork to establish our various bank and investment balances at least within the last month or quarter.
A smart policy will establish a statute of limitations (maybe 10 years) so that we can put this darn thing behind us and move on with whatever we decided could be proved from incomplete records.
Wouldn’t we be able to fix it fairly fast? The anti-static bags that we store replacement computer parts in act as Faraday cages. Any bank with critical servers would already have a supply of these parts on hand.
Our money already is fiat currency. What good would it be to replace an existing fiat with a new fiat? Basing Fiat Bucks 2.0 on someone’s say-so that they had five thousand pre-magnetar dollars in the bank would be a really bad plan. Sure, some percentage of people will be honest, but with no way to prove anyone’s claim, what do you do when people catch on and start claiming they had five million dollars? Or fifty million?
We actually had a very small-scale demo of this scenario about ten years ago when a mainframe had a hardware failure and started picking daisies. If I remember it right, a memory module went bad, but the processor caught the errors. When the system tried to correct or compensate, it hit a perfect storm bug in the microcode and shut everything down and kept everything down at the primary and backup sites. The system did exactly what it was supposed to do, just a lot more aggressively than designed. For about half a day, people’s ATM/debit cards didn’t work, but for some people, that was enough to be practically the end of the world when they couldn’t get gas and had to walk home, or had to visit neighbors to see if they could borrow something to eat, etc.
This was one day of people unable to access their money, and it wasn’t just poor people either. A lot of people walk around with a couple dollar bills and an ATM card, expecting that anything they can’t get for two or three bucks can be bought with their bank card.
What will anti-static bags do? They’re not anti-magnetic. Also, it’s been a while since I’ve even seen one. The last time I bought some bare drives, they were packed in anti-static boxes with no bags, and the same goes for RAM modules.
As for a fast fix, if we can keep that pesky magnetar to one side of the country or the other, our truly critical stuff runs on hot mirrored data centers. If one goes down, the other picks up immediately.
