Very Long-Term Backup | Hacker News Reader

Very Long-Term Backup

kk.org

82 pointsnreece28 comments

Can you buy these things?

Patek Philippe may prattle on about how their watches are meant to be passed on to descendents, but this is something whose use is explicitly dependent upon outliving you. Heck, losing it adds to its value!

I'm not one for knick-knacks but I'd love to own one of these. Even as a fad, profitable sales could considerably increase their number and geographic distribution while reducing their cost (hand made at $25k? There must be a way to automate that!).

From the article:

Or you can have one on earth, if you want, acting as an additional node in the distributed archive. There are still two disks available from this prototype run. Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000. Contact the office if you are interested in caretaking an archive of all languages.

Seems like there's a business opportunity here. The problem they are addressing is the fact that digital storage, when done incorrectly, can be very fragile. I know several people that have lost all of their pictures due to hard drive crashes or theft. These people are now making physical copies of EVERYTHING and putting them in safes and safe deposit boxes.

The currently accepted solution is to copy everything up to "the cloud" where things are backed up and redundant. While this is a good solution for a lot of people, it's not for everyone. I get the feeling that there's a group of (mostly older) people out there that would want (and be be willing to pay for) a longer lasting, physical storage medium like this. A long-lasting write-once medium like this might be a good compromise between digital (easy to store a lot, fragile) and analog (harder to store a lot, longer lasting).

The main issues with this type of medium, though, would be price and compatibility.

Agreed. I would love to buy one if the price drops anywhere below $100.

From what I can tell, this is also in the creator's best interest as that is the natural direction for this project -- One in every household.

This is very cool! But I sort of think hebrew should have been given a bit more prominence - it's the original version of the document after all.

Most of the translations are translations of translations, not direct (and some are even 3rd generation), which will hurt analysis if you don't know which the original is.

If you do not so much care about the actual text - but about the languages, that will be less of a problem.

For entrepreneurs:

Do guaranteed-safe data storage right and you will have a killer app. How do you really plan to last for 100 or 1,000 years? We all have lots of value tied up in our data. Think of long-term storage as time-shifting that value, just as files are a way of time-shifting data processing. I believe cperciva is working on this.

If you know that you won't need it until a certain date, you can just shoot the data into space, speed it up relativistically, and slow it back down a few seconds later--the data won't have degraded any, but the rest of the universe will have ;)

I would certainly be interested in this sort of product if it was priced reasonably.

Very cool. While the long-term storage aspect itself is really interesting, I'm more intrigued by the different ideas for how to preserve human communication for future and/or extraterrestrial civilizations that have no direct contact with current languages. (Regardless of what you think of aliens -- how would you communicate?)

* http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI

Something reasonably priced with a guaranteed lifetime of 50 to 100 years would sell like crazy.

You remember those big 'ol 12" laserdiscs that Phillips used to make? Hospitals still use 'em for archiving scans.

How long do those last?

I've heard 100-150 years, but time will tell I guess!

Microfiche is still in heavy use in many places. Keep it in a dark vault with controlled temperature and humidity and it will last for 500 years.

you mean, like, paper?

See, I'm right!

Or I could just upload it to google amirite?

The real problem here isn't backups. It's archaeology. Keeping the data you want is easy - just about everyone in computing is working on some version of that.

I understand promiscuously spreading the disks around but crashing it onto a comet?

How are we ever going to get that one back when we need it?

Obviously, you just wait for an itinerant hero to be played by someone who wants to finish all of the collection quests before they beat the game.

A good question to be sure but, I don't think that we should consider that disk as a backup intended for us. FSM forbid that something terrible should happen to us, perhaps another intelligent species may find it long after we're gone.

even if we survive Languages are dieing off so fast that who knows how many will be left 3k years from now.

Things will have degenerated to the point where only an offshoot of English exists. However, this will have a vocabulary consisting only of the word "like."

Station!

Word

I guess it will be more - like - Chinese?

What do you figure are the chances something like google docs (via the GFS) would work for this?

A bet that google will still be around in 100 years, or will buy insurance to guarantee long term storage via some foundation if they do go out of businesss, seems reasonable to me.

GFS does CRC and multiple copies to guard against data corruption right?

Aliens, my dear Watson. Aliens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com