Hacker News Reader

Comment by avdlinde | Hacker News Reader

Never seen this before, very interesting!

But how much can one realistically print? 500KB per page isn't much for today's data hoarding standards.

I guess you don't keep images?

500KB/page at $0.02/page = $20.97/GB. HDD is $0.01-0.03/GB, SSD is $0.10-0.25/GB, BD/DVD are $0.02-0.10/GB, respectively, at retail prices and before counting redundancy. $20/GB was as far back for HDD as Oct 1999, which by the way fell further to around $7.50 next year in Oct 2000[1]. Yeah interesting but 10-100 fold density improvement would be nice...

1: https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

25G BD-R can be had for 8 ct. However, the patent license royalties are at about 10 ct (I forgot if USD or EUR). Also, you can't retroactively pay the royalties when importing. Patents are bad. They would have developed BluRay without patent protection.

I do have a many GBs of blobs backed up both in external HDs and cloud, but my most important data (which is what I plan to keep redudant copies on paper) is just notes and source code which I keep in small private git repos.

BTW I still haven't backed up anything to paper yet, I bought a laser printer last year to follow that path, but ended up not doing it yet :/

Many years ago, I used to contemplate how much data you could store on a piece of paper with a laser printer. Like a QR code but optimized as much as possible. I only got as far as figuring out how to address a page as a bitmap at full resolution, because I'm not good at algorithms.

I was reading today Wikipedia about Turbo Codes, Viterbi encoding and similar things and it would be interesting to me to read how a very smart person would solve the problem of maximizing data stored on paper with reasonable error correction.

Github recently backed up a lot of open source projects on hardened microfilm and stored it in the Artic. See https://archiveprogram.github.com/

If only there were some other technique to print a large image file onto a page /s

Sure, encryption over image data and printing works fine for retrieving it at a later date.

I was referring to printing the image pixels rather than a serialization of the binary data. A quality printer can do 600dpi in full color - an A4 page can hold a very large image.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com