Ask HN: How to store your data for 200 years?

[dnqthao]

Let's say that I want to store my data for 200 years so that my great-great-great grand children can access it. The data I want to store include: images, text, videos. What should I do?

[mikewarot]

You're asking a technical question, which is the wrong way to go here.

1. Make sure you have all the faces in the photos labeled in a way that can be accessed in the future. Old physical photos without the names written on the back are essentially worthless, as nobody knows who they are. Full names, and how everyone is related, perhaps a bit of story is important.

2. Make sure your kids are interested in this stuff, or your grandkids. If they don't want it, it's all going to be pitched out, and you're wasting your time. My child has expressed a desire for a modest subset of my 650 Gb of personal photos. I'm going to weed it wayyyyy down for her, and make sure all the photos are labeled correctly and completely.

3. Make sure they have sufficient income to live their lives, and also pay for a new hard drive from time to time, to copy the information forward in time. A box of photos is generally quite easy to store, if you have a home.

PS: Am I the old man here? Nobody else mentioned this angle yet, and to me it seems to be the most obvious.

[tripleo1]

Great answer/comment. But how will you ensure the pictures (physical artifacts) survive? In other words, how old is the oldest picture you have now?

[mikewarot]

Generally, you keep photographs in a cool, dry location, and keep them away from direct sunlight. Most other objects require some form of climate controlled storage. It could be in a closet, cabinet, etc. Not a garage or basement, those tend to be too humid.

We have photographs that are 100 years old. I have floppy disks from the 1980s that can still be read. Books from the 1800s. Tools over 100 years old.

[ubj]

M-DISCs were created with the intent to store data for long periods of time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

The company claim is 1000 years of storage life. Independent testers have rated it for up to several hundred years.

The main drawback is ensuring that DVD / Blu-ray readers still exist that far into the future.

[tripleo1]

Also, who is still going to have a USB cord? An even if you do, is it going to be the right onw?

[legitster]

Establish a legal trust to care and preserve the data and fund it.

A slightly cheaper lifehack - have the data official published and get it submitted to the Library of Congress who will preserve it for you.

[ac2u]

Money + redundancy

Copies in multiple physical locations. Copies on paper if it's text. Digital copies on tapes and archive quality DVDs. Storage in low UV, low moisture, low everything fireproofed faraday cages.

Store some complete hardware along with some copies for helping to access the data, along with instructions.

Then assume all of that will fail and take a load of money and put it in a trust so it can be accessed at intervals to your descendents upon instructions in your will where an executor (who is also paid well) can verify that they've done the work to copy your data to the new types of media of the day. Include detailed instructions so that the monetary rewards based off a 1% skim off the growth of the invested funds to increase the chance of the investments lasting through generations. Ensure that the executor can pass being an executor on to future generations through additional financial rewards.

Or just don't worry about it. If it's sentimental data have it live on through stories and good memories :)

[LabMechanic]

A layman question:

If Faraday cage holes are smaller than the gamma ray wavelength, does it protect against gamma rays? Or is a thick lead wall needed for M-Disc protection? Is it even possible to construct such small cage holes?

gamma rays = electromagnetic waves

Preserving an M-Disc against a nuclear blast seems futile, as the high temperatures can turn even stone into dust. Is there even a practical way to engineer survival in a nuclear blast? (Any physicists? Engineers?)

Here's a guide on making a Faraday cage, but can it also protect against gamma rays?

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Faraday-Cage

[ac2u]

>does it protect against gamma rays

Probably not. Might need to throw in some lead, concrete and water barriers.

I wrote my answer as pretty tongue in cheek. It gets to a stage where certain threats being solved for would wipe out humanity anyway, which is why my last suggestion is summarising the lessons of your data into stories and parables to be passed on from generation to generation :)

[kristianp]

Encode it in your X chromosome. Bonus points if your descendants can hallucinate the images and video without any assistance. That would be useful if there's an apocalypse, but they may be burned as witches.

[palashkulsh]

Just perfect

[NarcisMirandes]

I am also interested in this area. All I know is under development. Meanwhile I would store things in a more conventional way to let those projects time to develop consumer products that are reliable and at a reasonable price.

For the future wha I think it is promissing:

- Microsoft project Silica https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfEYd4NGQg&list=WL&index=5

- 5D optical data storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

- DNA Data Storage. To use DNA to store vast amounts of digital data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage

[RagnarD]

One option is to use DVD media designed for archival use, with a non-oxidizing gold layer, e.g.: https://www.verbatim.com/prod/professional-optical/archival-...

[austin-cheney]

Just use a regular spinning hard drive, not any kind of solid state media. Solid state media must be charged and accessed periodically to retain its contents, like RAM, but billions of times slower.

Spinning hard disks use aluminum platters coated in an extremely purified layer of iron oxide (rust) all of which is super chemically stable. Once written your data will remain stable for hundreds of years until it is slowly ripped off the disk over time by gravity.

These drive are mechanical and the mechanics will fail far earlier so the data will need to be extracted from the disk directly by some invasive means. People already do this now to extract valuable data from damaged disks.

[PurpleRamen]

Regular hard drives are storing data through magnetic voodoo. Which means they will lose charge and thus data over time. And time here is measured in decades, not centuries. In fact, regular hard drives are even worse than SSD. Though, it all depends on the specific devices, how you store and handle them. There are also dedicated archive-HDDs, which are supposed to hold a bit longer than normal HDDs, but even they only promise decades. In general, for Anything longer than 50 years, don't even think about HDDs and SSDs.

[AnimalMuppet]

Drive bearings may not last 200 years. Drive electronics almost certainly won't last 200 years - especially the capacitors.

[kbrannigan]

Paper might outlast most modern storage systems. That's my controversial opinion.

Or like a stone tablet,

[mharig]

0. Buy archive paper and a printer and ink/toner that are certified for 200 years. Print out the specs of all the file formats you store. And of the filesystem, too.

1. If the data can be in the open, use archive.org. They assume a cost of 2 USD/GB, so please donate an appropriate amount.

2. As other commenters proposed, use M-DISC. But you must deposit M-Disc reader(s) and the hardware to drive those, and better be redundant.

3. Use endurance SDCards. They can be read (and written) by just 4 wires. Use UDF as filesystem. Print out the SDCard specs. Make sure you and your descendants put power to the SDCards every 5 years or so to refresh the cells.

[hulitu]

> Use endurance SDCards.

"As a computer, i find your trust in technology, amusing"

[mharig]

Personally, I have very good experiences with FLASH, and very bad experiences with spinning disc HDDs, CDROMs, DVDs.

IMHO, all long term cold storage is not reliable. Better to go with mid-term storage, and not just using one technology. For really important data, I would go for LTO AND BD AND SD card and maybe some paid online storage.

[hulitu]

Flash data retention is about 10 years. And with ROHS everything is a smoking gun.

[maCDzP]

I would go for physical copies. Print all the text and images. For video, why not use actual film and buy an old projector.

That stuff have a proven shelf life, compared to all the digital alternatives.

As a bonus, write it by hand or get a robot to mimic your handwriting. I believe your grand children (if they still can read handwriting) will get a small glimpse of your personality.

[adamredwoods]

Any storage is incredibly volatile. Physical players, media, humans struggle with storing, moving things around, finding ways to play it, unless it can be converted to stay with current media mutations.

Consider the rarity of Betamax players, early cellulite film. Obscure media like M-Discs I don't know if there will be players around in 50 years (zip drives anyone?). Or how people won't recognize the media if found in storage.

I feel acid-free paper and ink is still the best for archival. We have 8mm film from my grandparents that are about 60 years old, and my family was able to convert it to digital.

[WheelsAtLarge]

One of the issues you'll have to deal with is getting the data out. It's been less than 30 years since zip discs were available yet it is hard to find a drive and the drivers for modern computers. If you have a zip disc, you will have to work at getting your data out.

Given how easily hardware gets outdated, I would guess that a book-like apparatus made of plastic with the data pressed rather than written and a place to put it so that it's protected from the elements and whatever might damage it. It is your best bet now. Better yet, harden glass with the data etched into it.

[YaBa]

Text as simple ASCII

Images, videos and others, attach a text file with the format description, syntax and structure, who knows if in 200 years people still use jpg or mpeg or how to read/decode them.

I have some very old games with binary formats without any additional information, reversing them takes a lot of time, so, other than the physical medium, remember that what we take for granted today, might not be tomorrow.

[LabMechanic]

Indeed. We seem to assume semiconductors and computers are unlimited. It is just not practical to use your dog, a raven, or yourself as a Turing complete machine. You can't run Google on your Dog or yourself.

Hence, keeping "unused" electronics around might be wise, given the so called "unpredictable future" and supply chain interruptions.

Arguably, old and slow tech is still better than having nothing, as you do not have to do these boring computations by hand.

[brudgers]

Print everything on archival paper. Store in archival boxes a climate controlled environment.

Good luck.

PS: ask your kids if they want the stuff you are trying to impose on them first. They might not want it.

[paulcole]

Figure out the amount of money you’re willing to spend on this and then give it to a deserving cause who can actually do something useful with it.

Hardly anybody alive today wants their grandparent’s vacation slides. You thinking A) that you’re going to have great-great-great grandchildren and B) that they’re going to want pictures you took 200 years ago?

[mtmail]

"GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository on 02/02/2020 and preserved that data in the Arctic Code Vault. [...] will last 1,000 years"

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

As startup founder my question is if anybody would pay for such a service?

[hulitu]

> will last 1,000 years"

"Review comment: 2023-12-20 JD: Testcase TBD." /s

[seized]

I would say AWS Glacier Deep Archive. It works out to $1/TB/month, except for retrieve costs. Pick a region away from fault lines and coasts maybe though.

Jeff Barr agrees too: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-as-an-eternal-service/

[tamimio]

Without the videos, papers would be your ideal solution at a low cost, videos however, I believe the best way would be open sourcing it and putting it in the internet, if they are worthy enough, generations will keep it around for as long as your ideas will live in them.

[2rsf]

If you have the budget then try one of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Mission_Foundation

[sidewndr46]

No one has ever stored any non trivial amount of data from a computing system that long that we know of. You would in fact be the first person to do so.

[hulitu]

CIA and NSA would like to have a word with you. :)) /s

Anyway, they don't usually talk about their archival capabilities.

[coolThingsFirst]

You don't need to store your data. It's already there in PI. Find the location and pass it to your descendants.

[tripleo1]

> Find the location

!

[hmr]

Print on laminated paper.

[aborsy]

Cloud is the best solution in my opinion. Put your data in AWS and Azure. If they go out of business in 40 years, you transfer your data somewhere else.

[anonuser123456]

Images and text: archival pigment prints on acid free paper.

[kbrannigan]

Exactly! Easy to access, won't lose charge, doesn't need a password. It's is a 1 - 1 interface

[turtleyacht]

M-DISC is supposedly good for 1,000 years.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

How much data are we talking here?