What's the most long-lasting (digital) storage medium available? Obviously SSDs and HDDs both have limited lifespans affected by various factors. Even magnetic tape doesn't last that long.
Suppose I wanted to build a doomsday bunker, and in the bunker I wanted to store as many books as possible in some kind of bunker NAS, for example. What would I use? How would that decision change if I wanted it to operate constantly, versus on-demand access?
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Creat an organic lifeform that sings encoded data. All you have to do is feed it and it will live and reproduce until the sun burns out.
>the most long-lasting (digital) storage medium
Irrelevant. Backup isn't so much about the medium, but about the process, which usually involves copying old backups to a newer medium every once in a while, no matter what.
>all lifeforms will reproduce
thanks man, I needed that inspirational feel
inb4 the memes of the ancients are stored in bird songs
> Even magnetic tape doesn't last that long
LTO tapes have a staggering long shelf life. >30 years or more.
keep it on server-grade HDD's, replace every 5-6 years, keep cloud backups ( fiber/copper lines could really only be damaged in a strong earthquake/nuclear war/ city wide asteroid)
M-disc bluray works for me desu
It is about medium. In the hypothetical doomsday scenario, obviously replacement disks would be hard to come by. Sure you could stockpile replacements, but you'd still want to use something that lasts as long as possible in the first place. Of course nothing lasts forever and would have to be replaced eventually.
>cloud storage
suppose it was a completely off-the-grid network, then.
My best bet would be actual books, we know if books are well maintained they can literally last thousands of years.
Aye, that's true enough. Still, books can be hard to store well and take it quite a lot of space.
Something I find fun to think about that directs a lot of my self-education with computers is a hypothetical end of the world scenario. Suppose society collapsed and I was left alive. Would I be able to rebuild the internet? Given some hardware and some cables, how far would I be able it get with creating a full and robust network? What about resiliency? How long would I be able to keep my data and network alive? What threats would be able to end it?
Thinking about this is really interesting in my opinion and goes a long way to expose the gaps in your knowledge.
I think your real upper bound for durability will be the hardware that can read whatever media you store your stuff in. Once you don't have anything to read your stuff with, what's the point? I'm pretty sure magnetic tape can outlast whatever general purpose computer you might pick with all its points of failure. Also, said computer would probably need a form of storage to run the system on, so there's another bounding linfespan which also happens to be a suboptimal storage medium in itself.
You can't have computer stuffs without civilization.
However, if you encode your zeros and ones as a quite low sampling rate audio, pressed them into vinyl records, and stored them in as much isolation as possible from the element, you would have a form of backup which would most quickly be reaccessible in case of rebuilding a civilization from scratch. You can print out tables of needed unicode blocks and include them in the recovery package, as well as basic instructions on translating bumps into zeros and ones.
Though capacity would be pretty low, a few hundred MBs per record I suppose.
How do you hope to manufacture digital circuits? Even produce a stable current of electricity let alone things that rely on it?
Etch the information in binary onto stone
Question: why won't data on an SSD last forever if stored away in a cabinet?
What law of physics makes the electrons dissipate from the floating gates over time?
This 个
pay a million Buddhist monks to chisel binary into granite stones, it will last forever.
If you are talking actual doomsday bunker. Paper, Ceramic or metal plates with information lasered into it and on top of that digital aka HDD backups, inorganic bluray and LTO tape that properly stored can last 30+ years. But if we are talking actually preserving information in a doomsday scenario ceramic and metal plates are the only real option.
Do you guys claim that somehow etching binary onto stone will have greater information density per area than etching the actual text?
This is what I do: store anything I want to keep long term, like photographs and old games, on my active hard drives.
That way every time I make a backup of my recent data I also make a backup of my old data.
It also ensures I can't forget where I put them.
Only downside is needing extra big drives as the data piles up.
But storage grows exponentially so what what a lot of data in the 1990's is now very manageable.
dvd obviously... can last theoretically hundreds of years
Quantum tunneling
Only high quality non organic DVDs and Blurays tho. Not the cheap shit you get on amazon or at wallmart.
It's also about the fact that you need to (regularly) check that your backups are actually working just fine. There's nothing like coming back to your backed up data only to realize that you can't read shit back any longer, for whatever reason that may be. This combined with redundancy is way more important the the lifetime of the used medium. Backing things up is hard. Copying some shit on whatever you think will hold longest wont do shit. And probably only contributes to a fake feeling of safety where there is none.
M-Disc bluray. Engrave your data into stone.
If you can find them, gold based 'medical grade' CDRs are supposed to have a 100+ year lifespan:
Engrave data in quartz.
M-Disc maybe.
But you shouldn't ignore hdd anyhow, enough in a good storage setup are very good.
See Obviously backups must be maintained regardless of medium. I don't know why you would use "but everything fails eventually!" as an argument
Adaption in Enterprise let alone Consumer markets will probably be sometime around the heat death of the universe then.
Nah, even stone can be damaged by the elements.
I thought about stainless steel like cryptosteel for bitcoins.
Because it doesn't matter how regularly you check/change/update the medium. It just needs to be appropriate. The important thing is that you do without failure.
I still don't understand what you're trying to argue. The goal is to persist data for as long as possible with as few resources as possible. Obviously you could persist anything if you have enough replacements. No one is under the delusion that some storage medium will last forever. The game is optimization.
No. Just no. There is no "quantum" anything, this isn't poorly understood near magic effects of some mythical theoretical particle. This is simply electrons being so small they can move through any material at the path of least resistance, because nothing can exert 100% perfect electrical control over them. It is current leakage. It is nothing but current leakage. It is current leakage in short channel devices, and it happens at literally every feature size, it is not exclusive to small FinFET devices like upcoming 5nm EUV FinFETs. Even planar devices have extremely high degrees of leakage through their channels, directly under the gates, electrons still leak out. Yet despite this the transistors still function.
Quantum tunneling is a meme regurgitated by people who know nothing about the field of FETs.
>The game is optimization.
No! The game is having a solid, dummy proof and failsafe process.
>being this autistic
How else are you going to store my meme collection in stone
Probably a granite slab. You can carve digital information on it.
Write speeds are pretty bad, though
And no matter how solid your process is, one storage medium requires more physical resources than the other which is a serious problem if you're goal is "preserve this information as far into the future as possible". What part of this isn't getting through to you?
If the electrons could simply leak away the memory would be wiped in a matter of nanoseconds, not years.
Quantum tunneling is how the electrons end up on the floating gate.
But from my understanding tunneling on or off the gate requires a fixed amount of energy, so the electrons shouldn't be able to tunnel off my themselves unless they somehow gain energy - maybe through cosmic rays or something?
do they even make not organic anymore?
Probably PROM.
(the traditional kind that writes data by melting a wire)
Although oxidation might be a problem.
Yes, if you take a steel sheet you can turn it into a punch card
Each byte could be smaller than a letter, won't be readable by hand but making a machine to clean and process them shouldn't be hard.
Going back to punchcards is an interesting idea
Punch cards are very inefficient.
They can't just have a hole for every bit, because then the cards would fall apart from having too many holes and too little material to keep them together.
Instead, they would for example have 11 possible positions but only allow 2 holes and only in 64 different combinations (for 6 bits of data).
You clearly lack an understanding of how quantum mechanics works. Yes, quantum tunneling *is* a thing. Many quantum effects are. They can be observed in a laboratory. Quantum tunneling is literally how electron microscopes work. It can be encouraged, but it can also happen in a normal material by pure chance, albeit rarely. But, on long timescales "rarely" approaches "definitely, at some point".
FETs aren't magical. They can't ignore physics.
It's... complicated. Tunneling can allow electrons to escape wells they otherwise wouldn't have the energy to escape. They can essentially "borrow" energy and escape. A higher energy delta does make it less likely but the only way to make tunneling probability drop to zero is to stick electrons in an infinite well, which can't exist.
they’re laughably impractical but stone tablets would last even longer if kept in a place where erosion isn’t a huge problem