S3 as an Eternal Service

lastweekinaws.com

3 points·Corrado··3 comments

I often think about storage mediums and how they degrade. I still have some Amiga 880k diskettes that probably don't work. I had to ship my old VHS home movies off to a service to get them digitized because we don't have a VCR anymore. Guess where I stashed those files? Yes, in an S3 bucket.

Hell, I can't (conveniently) access CDs/DVDs, and that format is still popular. None of my current computers have drives for those formats. I do have a couple of external USB drives that I can dig out if I need to, but home much longer will those things be available?

As long as you have power and some sort of network access, you can get to S3 buckets. Maybe instead of writing notes to people (postcards, thank you letters, etc.) we should start sending S3 links.

The big caveat with S3 is that somebody still needs to pay the bill, otherwise those files are going to disappear. Meaning, at a bare minimum, you'll need to log in every few years when your credit card starts to expire. That makes it difficult to just pass an S3 bucket down to your children.

I think Arweave has a pretty neat solution to this; you pay for 200 years of storage upfront and that creates an 'endowment' that will theoretically pay people to host your file forever. Only time will tell how well this system works, however.

>I still have some Amiga 880k diskettes that probably don't work.

Look into GreaseWeazle.

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