How to store digital files for posterity? (hundreds of years)
How to store digital files for posterity? (hundreds of years)
I have some family videos and audios and I want to physically save them for posterity so that it lasts for periods like 200 years and more. This allows great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to have access.
From the research I did, I found that the longest-lasting way to physically store digital content is through CD-R gold discs, but it may only last 100 years. From what I researched, the average lifespan of HDs and SSDs is no more than 10 years.
I came to the conclusion that the only way to ensure that the files really pass from generation to generation is to record them on CDs and distribute them to the family, asking them to make copies from time to time.
It’s crazy to think that if there were suddenly a mass extinction of the human species, intelligent beings arriving on Earth in 1000 years would probably not be able to access our digital content. While cave paintings would probably remain in the same place.
@Clinico@lemmy.eco.br The M-DISC is your solution. Then just keep it in a cool dry place, airtight plastic bag if possible, and it will last longer than people will remember you.
Also, make sure to store a **desktop **computer in an airtight container next to your disks. If you have spare cash then get backup parts for the computer and keep them in their factory anti-static bags. No GPU needed, get a CPU with an integrated GPU.
Finally, in my opinion, information survives longer when it’s wanted. Get a big monitor, slap it against a wall, plug in a mini fanless PC, and have a random slideshow running during your waking hours. Let family add to the living slide show, teach them how to access the family NAS drive, show them how to access the archival disks in the basement, show them how to make new archival disks as they generate data to add to the family archives of house Clinico.
Print the hexdump of the file or qr code of the hexdump on paper. I store backups of my password manager db like this just in case there is a solar flare or some other magic bullshit that wipes all my pendrives/sd cards/CDs.
Or you could encode the hexdump to audio and press it into vinyl. But in this case, as well as the QR, i think, you’ll have to keep some physical backup (that isn’t encoded) of the decoding algorithms for QR or the audio, otherwise you just have some funky pixelart/bleepbloop sounds to enjoy but no data - if every other copy is gone… Well, you could spend the rest of your life trying to calculate it then?!
New SLC flash can store data for about 100 years when kept at room temperature. The data retention time will drop with write cycles though. Consumer SSDs use TLC or QLC flash, which is only guaranteed for 1 year of offline data retention, but it will probably be good for several years if it’s not worn out.
SLC NOR flash often has a typical rating of 100 years at 25°C, but only 20 years at maximum operating temperature is guaranteed. These flash chips are a few megabytes or less and are used for storing firmware in embedded devices. They are often written once and expected to retain their data for the lifetime of the device without having the ability to automatically rewrite blocks that are loosing their charge like an SSD.
Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.
When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.
Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.
Added edit:
Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.
The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.
M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?
I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.
Do you really think you are going to find a working CD drive in 100+ years? Try finding a working 8" floppy drive and a computer that can interface with one. They are only 50 years old and it’s quite a task to read an 8" floppy now.
Data has to be transferred to new media as it becomes available if you want to keep it and be able to read it decades later.
Sometimes I scrounge around bargain tech and I see a vga port (is that a serial port? I can’t remember) or the green/purple ports for a mouse and a ??? (keyboard???) and I am blown away because I forgot they existed. And do you remember that big fat fuckin’ port that you put a printer on? Cause I remember having to undo, redo, undo, redo that fker a hundred years ago because it never seemed to connect right. But I can’t even tell you WHERE I was messing with that. Maybe a library. I just remember it because it was the size of a harmonica (but not really).
Kinda doubt that tbh think at most 15-20 years then we’ll look at USB A like how we see serial today. We’re still in the infancy stages of companies phasing it out even though it started like 8 years ago.
yeah but the CD keeps being backwards compatible with DVD players, then Blu-ray, then UHD Blu-ray… these new 125tb discs are the same form factor again. i think we’ll have CD players way longer than tape decks
Printing flip-books for the videos and keeping that in essentially a time-capsule. With a vacuum if you can afford it. Not perfect but will definitely last for hundreds of years. Look at the Magna Carta for inspiration.
For the audio, vinyl and kept in an even stronger container, instruct everyone to use gloves before touching it.
Microfilm Is basically the only method that will work until the end of this planet when stored properly. Governments usually store important data on microfilm in deep bunkers.
Btw, a HDD technically can last forever as the stuff is physically written into the plate. The problem is accessing the data.
Magnetic tape drives are also a idea, they are slow and all but basically indestructible, same goes for the reader. You “just” need to make shure you have a adapter XD
And no, CDs are not the longest lasting. If you want to store shound forever, vinyls are your friend.
Digital storage is hard to preserve, make stuff physical if you want to have ot in many years.
HDDs aren’t written physically onto the plate. They flip magnetic fields. Anything relying on magnetic fields to store data is going to have a lifespan measured in decades, at best.
It tells that you have no fucking clue. The magnetic writing is physical. And i have drives older than you that still work fine. A HDD disk lasts technically forever when keep inside its Faraday cage (outside the magnetic storms from the sun could damage it), the problem is the part that needs electricity to keep stuff stored, wich is the most important part when you want to access the data, as it contains the information about where what is stored, without that you would read a shit load of 0 an 1 but without actual meaning (its technically possible to compose Coherent data but its in short basically gambling with disadvantage)
lol a drive continuing to work for 10 years doesn’t mean that you could write to that drive, and have it sit in a drawer for over 10 years without the data getting corrupted.
Did you read? The data corruption comes from the controller dieing, wich is exactly what i said. This isn’t the disk itself, its about the (basically) SSD that stores the data about what is where on the disks and the firmware necessary to access it.
I talked specifically about the disks itself, not the HDD in general, the HDD contains a SSD wich needs power to stay alive.
My point was that the plates themselves will keep the data forever unless they are exposed to strong magnetic interferences (earths own magic field isn’t really a problem as its pretty stable, it’s mostly bringing other magnets close or having them exposed in a solar storm wich would cause actual damage to the plate)
I don’t think I’ve had a conversation that felt so much like Reddit on Lemmy until just now. when stored at a non-absolute zero temperature, magnetic discs are subject to thermal relaxation, even if they’re kept at a steady temperature. besides the fact that you’re going to pretend like we weren’t specifically talking about the HDD plates, I’m not continuing this conversation because holy shit you’re just trying to be frustrating
Not true the charge in the cells also leaks so it well eventually become corrupt. You can see it in running SSDs in sections that are not written to a lot. The data sits there unchanged and the SSD has to do error correction and it slows down the drive.
Yes, the controller dies slowly but the HDD disk itself remains unchanged. The corruption comes from the dieing controller wich is because the controller dieing means the plate looses the information about where what is located on the disks.
Highly presumptive on many fronts, as well as conflating the ability to reliably write with the ability to read data over the same time span. So, tell me of the connector on this hard drive that you have that is older than me. And what do you use that drive for beyond as a curiosity?
And there’s that presumption. Just like the idea that a Faraday cage will block a magnetic field such as the earth’s. And unless your suggestion is that the poster just has to store his archive on the moon or farther, it will still be subject to influence from another magnetic field. And everything I’ve read puts bit rot at about 1% per year, which means, even with aggressive error correction about 50% of the archive will be lost within 70 years without an active refresh of the media. That’s not what’s generally meant by archiving. If it was, we would be talking about a process and a commitment by third parties to keep some random person’s archive intact for a century, unless what you’re really trying to suggest is that the real trick to building an archive that will last over a century is to live even longer?
Are you insane? A Faraday cage protects against magnetic fields and other interferences, thats why they exists, the earths magnetic field is no problem btw, its actually protecting our shit because ot keeps most of the magnetic Solarstroms away from our electronics.
It was also just a fun fact type of info, as its impractical, the data may be there but access will be lost in the near future, that was what i said as well. I suggest microfilm or vinyl. Nobody is going to take care of the stuff after you die anyway.
(btw you could pay say AWS to keep your archive forever, as long as Amazon exists it will be ported and always accessible, paying after your death would be a problem however…)
No. Its just a problem in the production process, when done wrong it can be a problem for the environment. But besides that, no, you can even eat from it.
I’d just keep a couple different copies and then copy them every 5-10 years, or as new technology comes along. Maybe something like this will be available for consumers in the near future.
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@Clinico@lemmy.eco.br The M-DISC is your solution. Then just keep it in a cool dry place, airtight plastic bag if possible, and it will last longer than people will remember you.
Also, make sure to store a **desktop **computer in an airtight container next to your disks. If you have spare cash then get backup parts for the computer and keep them in their factory anti-static bags. No GPU needed, get a CPU with an integrated GPU.
Finally, in my opinion, information survives longer when it’s wanted. Get a big monitor, slap it against a wall, plug in a mini fanless PC, and have a random slideshow running during your waking hours. Let family add to the living slide show, teach them how to access the family NAS drive, show them how to access the archival disks in the basement, show them how to make new archival disks as they generate data to add to the family archives of house Clinico.
Print the hexdump of the file or qr code of the hexdump on paper. I store backups of my password manager db like this just in case there is a solar flare or some other magic bullshit that wipes all my pendrives/sd cards/CDs.
Or you could encode the hexdump to audio and press it into vinyl. But in this case, as well as the QR, i think, you’ll have to keep some physical backup (that isn’t encoded) of the decoding algorithms for QR or the audio, otherwise you just have some funky pixelart/bleepbloop sounds to enjoy but no data - if every other copy is gone… Well, you could spend the rest of your life trying to calculate it then?!
Is this running or not running though? I think a bunch of flash chips, properly stored, would last quite a while
Eeeeeh, I guess flash would loose charge in a few years anyway.
How about archival-grade Blu-ray? Those could last over 100 years.
New SLC flash can store data for about 100 years when kept at room temperature. The data retention time will drop with write cycles though. Consumer SSDs use TLC or QLC flash, which is only guaranteed for 1 year of offline data retention, but it will probably be good for several years if it’s not worn out.
Where is this SLC quaranteed for 100 years.
SLC NOR flash often has a typical rating of 100 years at 25°C, but only 20 years at maximum operating temperature is guaranteed. These flash chips are a few megabytes or less and are used for storing firmware in embedded devices. They are often written once and expected to retain their data for the lifetime of the device without having the ability to automatically rewrite blocks that are loosing their charge like an SSD.
Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.
When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.
Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.
Added edit:
Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.
The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.
M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?
I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.
Long term storage requires an ongoing migration strategy. The whole ecosystem for reproduction gone away your pristine media will be inaccessible.
I use mdisc bluray
Do you really think you are going to find a working CD drive in 100+ years? Try finding a working 8" floppy drive and a computer that can interface with one. They are only 50 years old and it’s quite a task to read an 8" floppy now.
Data has to be transferred to new media as it becomes available if you want to keep it and be able to read it decades later.
Sometimes I scrounge around bargain tech and I see a vga port (is that a serial port? I can’t remember) or the green/purple ports for a mouse and a ??? (keyboard???) and I am blown away because I forgot they existed. And do you remember that big fat fuckin’ port that you put a printer on? Cause I remember having to undo, redo, undo, redo that fker a hundred years ago because it never seemed to connect right. But I can’t even tell you WHERE I was messing with that. Maybe a library. I just remember it because it was the size of a harmonica (but not really).
As long as it has a USB-A port, I think it will be good. We can’t seem to kill that one. ;)
Kinda doubt that tbh think at most 15-20 years then we’ll look at USB A like how we see serial today. We’re still in the infancy stages of companies phasing it out even though it started like 8 years ago.
you can physically wire A into C, it’s the same protocol. This won’t be broken like other adapters because neither device even knows about it
He was most certainly being sarcastic.
yeah but the CD keeps being backwards compatible with DVD players, then Blu-ray, then UHD Blu-ray… these new 125tb discs are the same form factor again. i think we’ll have CD players way longer than tape decks
I think CD is more or less at the end of its livecycle, most PCs sold today don’t even have a cd drive anymore.
They haven’t had any kind of drive for a while now. You know what does though? Game consoles.
Sure, but getting the data from the disks through a game console sounds pretty not fun.
The point is that even if CD or DVD drives aren’t produced nearly as much, there is still a market for newer drives that still support CDs and DVDs.
Printing flip-books for the videos and keeping that in essentially a time-capsule. With a vacuum if you can afford it. Not perfect but will definitely last for hundreds of years. Look at the Magna Carta for inspiration.
For the audio, vinyl and kept in an even stronger container, instruct everyone to use gloves before touching it.
Constantly migrating your data from one storage to the next seems like the only real way.
Hardware solutions personally. . raise too many doubts. Like those “100 year discs”, that just screams untested/untestable.
Microfilm Is basically the only method that will work until the end of this planet when stored properly. Governments usually store important data on microfilm in deep bunkers.
Btw, a HDD technically can last forever as the stuff is physically written into the plate. The problem is accessing the data.
Magnetic tape drives are also a idea, they are slow and all but basically indestructible, same goes for the reader. You “just” need to make shure you have a adapter XD
And no, CDs are not the longest lasting. If you want to store shound forever, vinyls are your friend.
Digital storage is hard to preserve, make stuff physical if you want to have ot in many years.
I think microfilms plastic properties arent guaranteed past about 500years
If stored correctly it does.
HDDs aren’t written physically onto the plate. They flip magnetic fields. Anything relying on magnetic fields to store data is going to have a lifespan measured in decades, at best.
It tells that you have no fucking clue. The magnetic writing is physical. And i have drives older than you that still work fine. A HDD disk lasts technically forever when keep inside its Faraday cage (outside the magnetic storms from the sun could damage it), the problem is the part that needs electricity to keep stuff stored, wich is the most important part when you want to access the data, as it contains the information about where what is stored, without that you would read a shit load of 0 an 1 but without actual meaning (its technically possible to compose Coherent data but its in short basically gambling with disadvantage)
lol a drive continuing to work for 10 years doesn’t mean that you could write to that drive, and have it sit in a drawer for over 10 years without the data getting corrupted.
Did you read? The data corruption comes from the controller dieing, wich is exactly what i said. This isn’t the disk itself, its about the (basically) SSD that stores the data about what is where on the disks and the firmware necessary to access it.
did YOU read? we were talking about HDD
I talked specifically about the disks itself, not the HDD in general, the HDD contains a SSD wich needs power to stay alive.
My point was that the plates themselves will keep the data forever unless they are exposed to strong magnetic interferences (earths own magic field isn’t really a problem as its pretty stable, it’s mostly bringing other magnets close or having them exposed in a solar storm wich would cause actual damage to the plate)
I don’t think I’ve had a conversation that felt so much like Reddit on Lemmy until just now. when stored at a non-absolute zero temperature, magnetic discs are subject to thermal relaxation, even if they’re kept at a steady temperature. besides the fact that you’re going to pretend like we weren’t specifically talking about the HDD plates, I’m not continuing this conversation because holy shit you’re just trying to be frustrating
Not true the charge in the cells also leaks so it well eventually become corrupt. You can see it in running SSDs in sections that are not written to a lot. The data sits there unchanged and the SSD has to do error correction and it slows down the drive.
Yes, the controller dies slowly but the HDD disk itself remains unchanged. The corruption comes from the dieing controller wich is because the controller dieing means the plate looses the information about where what is located on the disks.
Highly presumptive on many fronts, as well as conflating the ability to reliably write with the ability to read data over the same time span. So, tell me of the connector on this hard drive that you have that is older than me. And what do you use that drive for beyond as a curiosity?
13 year old hard-drives aren’t that uncommon you know…
And there’s that presumption. Just like the idea that a Faraday cage will block a magnetic field such as the earth’s. And unless your suggestion is that the poster just has to store his archive on the moon or farther, it will still be subject to influence from another magnetic field. And everything I’ve read puts bit rot at about 1% per year, which means, even with aggressive error correction about 50% of the archive will be lost within 70 years without an active refresh of the media. That’s not what’s generally meant by archiving. If it was, we would be talking about a process and a commitment by third parties to keep some random person’s archive intact for a century, unless what you’re really trying to suggest is that the real trick to building an archive that will last over a century is to live even longer?
Are you insane? A Faraday cage protects against magnetic fields and other interferences, thats why they exists, the earths magnetic field is no problem btw, its actually protecting our shit because ot keeps most of the magnetic Solarstroms away from our electronics.
It was also just a fun fact type of info, as its impractical, the data may be there but access will be lost in the near future, that was what i said as well. I suggest microfilm or vinyl. Nobody is going to take care of the stuff after you die anyway.
(btw you could pay say AWS to keep your archive forever, as long as Amazon exists it will be ported and always accessible, paying after your death would be a problem however…)
doesnt vinyl poison you?
No. Its just a problem in the production process, when done wrong it can be a problem for the environment. But besides that, no, you can even eat from it.
Time to crack out the ol’ microfische reels again for the photos.
I seem to remember an article about long term storage using quartz crystals from a few years ago, but I could be misremembering that
I’d just keep a couple different copies and then copy them every 5-10 years, or as new technology comes along. Maybe something like this will be available for consumers in the near future.
LTO tapes might fit the bill.
Core rope memory?
Memory density is about 2.5MB per cubic metre, might need to buy a warehouse to store it.