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Comment by julienb_sea | Hacker News Reader

There really isn't much market for it. You can pay Google or Apple or one of the large cloud providers a very reasonable and decreasing rate for a literal guarantee that your data is accessible. The only risk is the company goes under, which is extraordinarily unlikely for someone like Google / Apple and the shutdown would have advance notice.

I realize for the hacker news audience there are multitudes of reasons the solution above doesn't fit your needs, but realize the consumer market is near nonexistent.

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Wouldn’t the other risk be that after you’re dead and stop paying the data is deleted or inaccessible? Maybe if you could prepay 100 years it’d work?

If nobody is "inheriting" your data (or rather—nobody cares enough to keep your data around), it seems kind of moot to ensure it hangs around. That is, if I put stuff in an S3 bucket and pre-pay for 100 years, if nobody is around to download it in 100 years then why bother?

If you wanted to make a sort of digital time capsule and didn't care who discovered it, your next best bet would probably be the Internet Archive or some other archival community.

If your data isn't appropriate for archival (i.e., can't be publicly consumed) and isn't interesting enough for your friends/family/etc. to keep around on your behalf, keeping the data is purposeless.

I absolutely take inheritance into account when having backups lasting for a hundred years, but regardless of how uninteresting my data looks, we don't know if today's boring data would be invaluable for science in the future. We show slippers from 5000 years ago in museums today and they're invaluable. Consider the person who owned it, walking on a national treasure, unaware. Maybe, they didn't even like the slippers, found them boring. :)

I was thinking that DNA is a pretty robust storage medium. Perhaps we could use it in coming years to store data for long term survival.

Though considering these comments and the advent of mRNA/CRISPR, perhaps we could store data for future generations in our own DNA. That'd be fascinating if you could read journals or even audio/video of your ancestors from your biological inheritance from them. What if we could engineer an extra chromosome to do just that, then let them remix and recombine segments of memories so everyone's would be unique.

Just store your diaries in a line of yeast that produces tasty beer or wine. That could work. I wonder what the oldest yeast lines in use today are, and how stable their genomes are.

Or if you really want your data to survive, engineer it into a virus for your local species of cockroaches! Getting the data back could be gross, but it'll survive nuclear holocaust. ;)

The importance of those slippers is tied strongly to their rarity. So little survived from 5000 years ago that almost anything from that time is valuable.

By comparison, we'll create more data in the next ten minutes than entire centuries from our relatively recent history. Lots of stuff is getting preserved in lots of places with substantive redundancy for virtually nothing. Your slippers today are likely to be more valuable than the near-infinite troves of documents and photos and whatever else.

I agree consumer market doesn't exist because everyone is seduced by the cloud nowadays. Having said that supposed guarantees provided by these companies should not translate into blind and complete trust.

A single bad bug or security issue can make data inaccessible or corrupt. Tapes on the other hand does not have that issue. IMHO trusting all your important data to a single vendor or technology is a recipe for disaster.

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