Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012 (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012 (2014)

science.nasa.gov

PhD student working on geomagnetic storms- these storms would cause changes in the earth's magnetic fields of hundreds of nanoTeslas, and cause electric fields of a few (<10) volts per km. Only reason why power networks are affected is because they span hundreds of Kms.

The geomagnetic storms are generally over long periods- low frequencies. From a quick glance at Wikipedia, this is unlike an EMP.

I really doubt they'd affect equipment like HDDs.

Solar storms can be extremely damaging to the power grid (and by extension, to electronics that is plugged directly into that grid). But, as you note, the distances required to produce a strong current are just too great for any home electronics to be affected.

There's a lot of mythology surrounding this, largely because valid information on nuclear EMP is conflated with EM effects accompanying CME (coronal mass ejections). There is some overlap between the two, but the differences are far bigger.

http://www.futurescience.com/emp/E1-E2-E3.html

The video is fascinating, if a bit frightening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukQhycKOFw

Stupid question, but would such a storm wipe my HDDs that hold all my private data? If so, what would be a safe storage with similar capacities?

This may interest you:

https://superuser.com/questions/1014071/how-to-protect-my-di...

Standard advice: the best thing you can do for protecting data is have an offsite backup. This could be as simple as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc.

Why wouldn't the storm wipe out Dropbox / Amazon's HDDs too?

If you have that kind of concern for your data, there are solutions which involve actual nuclear bunkers... that would do the trick.

There are several factors:

1. Cloud storage is likely to have a more resilient backup strategy;

2. Magnetic storms tend to be localized so you want to spread geographically. So if for example you copy data to hard drives and store them at home and work you're still in danger to a localized storm; and

3. And this is the big one. A single physical location exposes you to far more likely risks than solar storms such as fire, flooding and theft.

About #2, solar storms are world-wide.

The upside at least there, is that there is some warning; you could stick everything you care about into a Faraday cage. Power lines... not so much.

No need. Just unplug them from the power lines and you are good.

I like knowing where my backups are, physically, but thank you very much. I will back up on my own disk and store them in secure locations.

Don't count on online backups to protect you from those¹. Anything plugged into a power grid anywhere can go away.

Offline backups would be safe (even from a close EMP, in HDD or SSD form).

1 - In theory you can have your power lines protected against those. But I wouldn't count on somebody's else lines being protected.

If your HDDs (or any other equipment) are inside a metal enclosure (like a standard PC case) and you unplug all external cables from it, it will be just fine. Any kind of metal enclosure with holes smaller than the wavelength of the radiation acts like a Faraday's cage, external EM field will not be able penetrate it. Solar storm generates a low frequency (very long wavelength) electromagnetic waves, so even a steel reinforced concrete construction (or any other metal net) with a good grounding would completely stop it.

would such a storm wipe my HDDs that hold all my private data?

No.

If they're plugged in to the wall, they might get fried into a powdery crisp.

But they wouldn't get merely erased, and if they're not connected to a wall socket they'll be completely fine.

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