Ask HN: QR Codes Unsuitable for Storing Gigabytes and Beyond in Graphic Format?

2 points·anon115··8 comments

Are QR codes the wrong approach for storing gigabytes worth of storage and beyond in graphical way? edit---it has to be a still image so people can print it out the image and 'download' have their cameras 'read' it from their phones,webcams ---you can laminate it if you want to and it will still be scannable

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Yes. QR codes are meant to store only a few kilobytes at most. They are not suitable for encoding gigabytes of data.

At perhaps 2KB per page, you'd need 524288 pages to store a 1GB. That's 1048 reams. Please just use an archival optical disk instead.

Even if the scheme using multiple QR codes in sequence rather than a single large code block. The paper backup implementations that use QR codes https://github.com/intra2net/paperbackup https://github.com/cyphar/paperback are only meant to be used for private key backup.

We don't know of anyone who's been able to reliably print more than 5 KB per page using QR codes on paper. How many pages do you want to use? See https://github.com/za3k/qr-backup/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md

If take the image size from an average phone you will get maybe 10-20 megapixels. There are phones which do 200. But a QR is going to take a great many pixels per byte. It not going to work.

https://github.com/cyphar/paperback ?

For very big amounts of data i would buy LTO Drives and multiple tapes.

It depends on the use case.

What is the problem you are solving?

i started with "wouldn't it be to cool to download call of duty, or gigabytes worth of music with a simple camera scan from a graphic drive"

Yes... that's not going to work.

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