Totenpass is a permanent digital storage drive made of solid gold
totenpass.com
totenpass.com
> The Totenpass is built from solid gold and nickel, which inherently resist destruction, never tarnish and will therefore outlive all other ephemeral forms of data storage, from hard drives to Cloud servers.
The FAQ:
> What can I do about a scratched card and can I get a replacement? Unfortunately, there is no remedy for scratched surface. During read back, information could still be recovered if the scratches are slight.
I'm thinking I'm missing something...
It can be scratched but that's easily prevented: put it in a plastic sleeve.
Gold is a fantastic element in that it's extremely non-reactive, and therefore resistant to most other things. The problem with gold though is that it melts at relatively low temperatures and is pretty soft. Alloying with nickel gives it hardness and raises it's melting point, but it's still well within the range that you could just straight up melt this using a MAP gas blow torch like is used for plumbing or really any significant fire event.
Additionally, the other downside of gold is that is scratches very easily. Their FAQ makes it clear that this is still a problem for Totenpass. The only advantage I see to a Totenpass over and M-Disk is that a Totenpass doesn't require any specific hardware to read, but both after being created require archival quality storage and care to prevent damage to the media. You know what else doesn't require specific hardware to read and survives a long time with archival quality storage and care? Acid-free paper. And it's a LOT cheaper than Totenpass.
Is this a joke, or do they actually think there's a market for this?
I see ads for emergency rations and even saw an ad for a while marketing a rugged USB memory stick that contains all of Wikipedia on it in case the Internet and society breaks down you can still look up how to do stuff.
If people are buying that stuff, they'll buy this I guess. Doesn't mean it's practical but they'll buy it.
fyi, in case anyone doesn't already know, wikipedia allows anyone to directly download their database.
Given that the testimonial is from “Chad”, I have to think that there is a bit of joke in here.
That said, maybe this was a weekend project they made, and they can monetize it relatively easily (not sure how, but I guess it is possible).
There was however another option -- gold plated CDs. These were $10 each, but supposedly lasted at least 10 years without going bad.
My entire dorm floor shared the cost of one box, and we'd use it for our most precious files -- our MP3 collection.
I still wonder where that disk is and if it still works...
I feel like the best bet in the short term is to buy a new, ever-larger external hard drive every year and copy everything onto it, keeping the old one off-site.
--
Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978099 (yesterday)
I think they are readable in all drives, but only burnable by certain drives. Also, they are not manufactured in DVD anymore, just Blu-Ray. Still hoping for any anecdata from personal use; checking here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mdisc&sort=byDate&type=comment
Another example of long term data storage is oral folklore traditions. Some Australian Aboriginal myths, for example, are claimed to contain references to geological events that date back 40k years.
The reason is, they used cryptographic techniques (in their kinship system) to validate the stories as they were told among differing tribes and identify alterations.
An example might be useful; it seems to me that religions inherently distort the message of their founders. For example, most of Buddhist teaching was developed long after the Buddha died. Christians have had multiple doctrinal conferences to determine what is the "true doctrine". Islam has been divided since shortly after the death of the Prophet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
They are usually are controllable via RS-232 or IEEE-488 and output any of several video formats. All extremely common, well documented protocols. Due to them using analog(!) to store the video, they're remarkably tolerant of defects. As someone who grew up watching a lot of rental laserdiscs with family, it was impressive how much damage a beat up rental disc could have and still play fine.
Man, the memories from that. A laserdisc machine spinning up was the most sci-fi thing EVER to a young kid.
That will work great once the company fails and its IP is sold off to some faceless entity. Truly long-term storage would include a specification for building a device to read the data.
So the reader is just an app. A normal smart phone is supposed to have the resolution necessary to read this. And the app isn’t available yet. Hmmm.
Additionally assuming civilisation falls, the ability to shape a lens that can discern nm details will probably be lost also.
I am guessing data that is supposed to be read from an app will be encoded in some manner - like QR codes (for example).
Gold is actually cheaper than a lot of these metals.
This process?
TIL
I suspect this is a coated surface, with the coating being easily vaporized by a 405nm pulsed laser.
I expect my SSDs to last 10 years since I don't do heavy writes to them often. Anyway, I do my ritual of buying a new spinning rust HD every 5 years and copying everything from my old drives for posterity of important data. Spinning platter HDs are my 'magnetic tape' for data storage.
We've had consumer drives lose data after only a few months if it isn't accessed, though that was at 60+℃, so data should last some amount of time in normal conditions.
HDDs don't fare substantially better, though: bitrot can happen in under a decade due to magnetic entropy/polarization decay.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may be lucky and get stuff off your 30 year old SCSI drive...
Odd of them to think that an object made of gold won't be stolen at some point in the far future and melted down into whatever shape its new owner deems fit.
The cheapest and safest long term data storage is stone tablets. Terrible information density and a logistical nightmare to move around though.
Plus if there is a ion blast from a nearby supernova, it’ll erase all electronic storage devices on earth
A gold plate lasts until whoever holds it decides to remelt it. Or it gets destroyed in a fire. If you want durability I would recommend sturdy slabs of fired terracotta, preferably stored at a stable lagrange point.
If you do something relevant for the humanity, like Newton, Gauss, or Ampere, you won't need to save any kind of information by yourself. Sharing it with other people will be sufficient.
edit: Found this on their website under "Every Totenpass is unique":
> Or you may choose to store thousands of documents or photographs to be retrieved at a later date using our proprietary reading technology and smartphone app.
So open source or well documented is probably not the way to go.
It's like trying to read a CD with your phone. No software in the world could help you there.
and most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold
That is a bold statement. Meusums are filled with non-gold artifacts!
Pretty sure stone wins by volume.
We might get 10^14 more bits out of something that costs 10^-7 as much today, but that's only 21 orders of magnitude out of a suggested 1200 or so.
The universe only has 10^50 tons of mass, so it's meaningless to even attempt to describe what would that cost would look like.
I'm personally saving up to buy a bit of storage when it only costs a thousand universes or so.
I do know what Moore's Law literally says. I thought it was fairly obvious I was generalizing, but yes the text as written is incorrect.
If you're not into the thought experiment, that's totally fine.
Platinum I believe beats it. But it is rare to find in antiquity because of the high melting point.
Or else put a layer of plastic on the surface more permanent than your standard floppy lcd screen throwaway.
For protecting the surface finish of the gold, you'd probably want something like the polycarbonate cases you sometimes see used for rare or precious coins.
drop it off a cliff, cut it in half. cut it quarters, hell shred it.
rub out a quarter of the letters. get it dirty, magnetize it. forget about it completely (it will turn up when you move).
let it sit in almost any dry environment for centuries or millennia.
let every technology that existed when it was created be forgotten.
It will still be readable.
Edit: from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_data_storage I'm assuming black and white is best for long term archiving. "an 8″ × 10″ 600dpi black-and-white image contains 3.43 MiB of data"
make the pixels tiny like that and you need some specific technology to retrieve the info - and if the format is fragile, a single smudged bit could ruin everything.
The 3.43MB@600dpi value does not include any redundancy and margin that a practical system needs.
Now let's build a block storage system that uses A4 paper as blocks :) Given the ubiquity of paper sheets, there should good sheet manipulation and archival systems around right ?
Either it's optical, but then microfilm would work much much better...
Or it's digital but then it's obvious bullshit, because how could you possibly read that data back with your phone???
We will have microscopes in 50 or 100 years but there almost certainly will not be any working phones or apps as we know them.
This idea is of course impossible since Nintendo would not give up the save file.
They compare with disks but don't compare it with other materials such as marble.
For some particular values of "best".
As gold is rather malleable (soft), these plates would probably scratch easily.
But - try to handle some fine gold one day. It is lustrous, but also incredibly easy to dent - drop it and it’ll scratch like a 2010s-era phone. It is easy to work, but won’t hold its shape. If we had oceans of the stuff, we still wouldn’t use it to make a car or a laptop or a pistol or a building, it would take the place of lead in things like counterweights and radiation shielding, maybe home insulation or cooking foil, places where its softness and density aren't too much of a drawback but the low reactivity is beneficial.
Yet another case of elementry school chemistry over-simplifying and getting things wrong. Silver and platinum compete with gold, even if you stay within the realm of elementary school definitions of metal.
My guess would also be that most people who had school chemistry would order the silver, gold and platinum correctly in terms of their relative reactivity (and value) because this replicates exactly the order of fanciness of credit cards, record sales etc.
I wonder if Jezz Bezos will have build something that's even bigger than a pyramid or the Taj Mahal. Maybe he'll buy half the moon or something.
I wonder what future civilisations - where smartphones and encryption algorithms have been long lost - will make of that?
And we thought the Egyptians left us a tough one to crack!
I think these guys really do believe this piece of jewelry solves huge societal problems.
Given the scratch-ability, the suggestion that these things are practical for robust archiving is laughable.
But if they're handled carefully I can imagine them being useful for smuggling data across borders by hand or by mail. Which makes them potentially useful for money laundering, one time pads, and such - at least until customs services catch on to what they are.
There are better and less showy ways to do all of the above, but presumably you can print a cover photo or message with some embedded steganography, and the data content won't be visible to casual inspection - an application of sorts, I guess.