Longaccess Wants To Cold-Store Your Digital Life For 30 Years
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Most of the data in that digital fossils is movies from that bay with pirates, but I guess there's still much more than 100GB of self-produced information - message (email, IM, phone) archives, digitized drawings, RAW photos, source code, savegames and so on.
Obviously, one could sort out the trash and compact the rest (like extracting a 10KB patch from several-gigabyte OpenWRT source tree, or radically compacting photo collection by deleting bad shots) and fit into 3GB/yr quota, but that's a hard and - unless one really wishes to fit some storage quota instead of just buying another hard drive - mostly pointless work.
Given this, I think 100 GB is probably an acceptable amount of storage for this day and age. That may change in 5 or 10 years time as technologies change and the size of images and videos expand. But in 5 to 10 years time, services like this will probably have changed to keep up with the times.
I'd rather see a service where you can upload your data, and it'll send you back a physical data container where your data is written on a medium that is guaranteed to last the ages - i.e. no magnetic or optical (think dvd / blu-ray) storage, but more of a stable solid-state or holographic storage. In a box that can be put in a safe for posterity to discover after 30 years.
You can get a 3 Pack of 25 GB archival Blue-Ray discs for $15. So, for $30 you have 150 GB of truly "cold/offline" data that should last significantly longer than 30 years. Toss that in a box somewhere to go hand-in-hand with the LongAccess/AmazonGlacier storage...
Guess, my experience would be better if I had bought pricier better-quality discs and stored them in climate-controlled environment instead of just stuffing a bundle on a shelf.
In my experience, cold storage is best with hard drives. Preferably, in RAID-1 setup, so if one in a pair accidentally dies, the other's likely to remain intact.
The US Department of Defense put a lot of effort testing their DVD Media [3], and it stood up well. We'll see if their Blu-Rays likewise get the same kind of certification/accelerated life-time testing, but, at the very least, I'm guessing they will last 30 years. Just don't leave them out in the Sun.
[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
[2] http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/
[3] http://www.mdisc.com/docs/chinalakemillenniatatestreport_mod...
My latest laptop has no DVD drive, and I would bet that a DVD would not be more useful than a cassette tape to my daughter in 20 years, even if the data on it is in good shape. We may not even have the WWW by then, much like we don't have Gopher any more. What we offer is a service: we will do what it takes to keep the data in good shape and make them accessible to anyone holding an Archive Certificate.
The DoD, or large companies don't need this kind of service: they have the resources to manage, migrate, validate, replicate, etc, their data for as long as they are valuable to them. If DVDs start to fail, I'm sure they'll notice it, and they'll spend a gazillion dollars to move data to a new medium.
I don't think any consumer has a special week of the year when they take out all their DVDs and HDDs and verify them, make new copies, and replace the bad ones.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Longaccess.
But, people should not rely solely on a third party solution for their archival needs. They should always have a copy of their data that is offline, and physically in their possession, in a ECMA-379/ISO-10995 certified format that will last a long time. Certified Archival Media, is precisely that - it's designed to last on the order of a 100 years or more with zero requirements to validate. If you are super paranoid then you could make two copies. Then, you have both of your bases covered; You have something you can touch, and is 100% under your control, and, simultaneously, Longaccess will take care of all of the hard work of checking integrity, reproducing data, transferring it from data system to data system (in whatever form that takes over the next 30 years), and otherwise ensuring that there is continuity of data which can be accessed by the user (or their descendants) from something as simple as a certificate.
And yes, I do agree that the achilles heal of DVD Archival Media is the very real possibility of there being no DVD players in 20-30 years from now. Here's hoping eBay is still around. :-)
If there is any demand for something someone will produce it, whether or not it's the latest and greatest technology.
There will also be a great deal of notice before a device as important as DVD / Blu-Ray stops being produced. I'd say it's a non-issue, especially since a great deal of data is being backed up on these disks.
Of course, multiple backup types and locations is always safer.
Who would you trust?
- making the use of Glacier friendlier to the average user
- providing a well defined way of accessing the data (retrieval, decryption, etc.). This is very useful if, for example, you want the files to be retrieved by your children in a couple of decades
- making a commitment to take care of the data for decades: if Amazon decides in 10 years that they are no longer interested in being in this business, we will move the data to an alternative provider, but nothing will change for our users.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Longaccess.
We just use a reliable technology. AFAIK Amazon is not in the business of preserving data for decades, but they are great at storing data. On the other hand, Longaccess' business is to preserve private data for decades, and using the best underlying technologies and services at each given point in time to do so.