Like I’d imagine there’s gonna be a lot of rain over time if I want this time capsule to last like idk 10 years? 30 years?
Is there like a box so tough its indestructible?
Can animals dig it up if I bury it?
How deep do it bury it?
Is the earth’s magnetism gonna affect the hard drive? (Or is there a better medium?)
Like I want this to be like very low budget, I don’t have millions to build an actual timecapsule like some organizations have done. Is there some cheap box that’s waterproof to protect a hard drive from damage for like 30 years buried in the ground?
Hard drives aren’t rated for 30 years, though. Even in optimal conditions, they’d deteriorate.
So, an atomic powered RAID array with SMART corruption correcting code attribute in a timed replacement sequence of a series of single platter, low RPM, drives, using ZFS?
But apparently, using a simple archival quality DVD+R or Blu-ray would work. (Don’t forget to include the hardware so you have something that can read it in the future.)
Apparently verbatim gold archive DVD+r has been rated for between 32 and 127 years with a minimum 18.
Some Blu-ray from a few corps is rated at 50 years.
Under ideal conditions.
However, I’ll stick to my crystal skulls and their magic alien data storage.
Also: https://github.com/usnationalarchives/digital-preservation
https://www.archives.gov/preservation/storage
Sidenote: my few Linux machines are all running on HDDs that are each at least 10 years old. With additional internal and external 5" and external 2.5" drives that are just as old. My oldest is probably about 15.
Thank the Linus for smartmontools and smartd/smartctl.
atomic powered
Brb, gonna steal the plutonium from the Libyans.
How much data do you need to store? 1.21 Gb?
Ok but now how do we keep the Bluray drive and any additional materials to make it itself compatible with future hardware it’ll have to interact with, in working order for the same timespan as the media it reads?
Archive level Blue-Rays sound interesting!
But note that any drive based solution with RAID or anything runs into the problem that the drives all age at the same time. Once one drive fails, the others are close to failing also.
proper archiving is surprisingly difficult, esp the time capsule idea. maybe this gets you started
Hard drives that aren’t used will get data errors over time. Usually for data storage this is counteracted with what’s called a “scrub” every so often (like few months). This just means the whole drive content is read, and the drive itself will figure out if any areas have a “weak signal”, and just rewrite that part.
Having only 1 drive without any mirror and without any way to detect potential errors (let alone a way to correct them) is a recipe for disaster.
And definitely don’t use an SSD.
I think if you want 10+ years with high assurance you probably want to burn the data to archival quality BD-R disks (not the dye based ones)
The right spinning platter hard drives might have a decent chance to make it 10 years but there’s a lot of possible failure modes and also a decent chance that when you try spinning it back up it gives nothing but read errors.
For cases for “only” 10-30 years I might pick a pelican-like case inside a makeshift wooden coffin-like outer layer. For longer I’d probably use a metal box like an ammo box inside the plastic case and a stone outer layer instead of wood
You would need to investigate the soil you put the wood in, in order to select the correct wood and wood treatment. The wrong kind of wood in certain soils can be broken down in weeks to months. Getting wood to last years is tricky and depending on the soil could even be impossible.
An ammo box is probably cheaper than a pelican case. I’d go for that no matter what.
A much better medium would be tape back up, or possibly Blu-ray discs. Either one would last a lot longer than a hard drive.
A so-called M-disk is rated for 1000 years. Artificial lab tests could at least ‘confirm’ a few hundred years. Amazing shit.
Add encryption to it, keep the keys safe (perhaps on another M-disk) and you’re set!
Those are used by US government agencies, such as the department of defense for archival purposes. They are rated for 100+ years.
They are also extremely expensive and only have the capacity of a DVD. Still…
Wut? They’re not extremely expensive, and they commonly have blue-ray capacity, so 50 GB.
And anyone can use them btw
If this is a real problem you have, and not just a thought experiment, I think rather than burying the data on some unreliable medium, your best bet is to just pay someone to store it for you offshore, away from the dictatorship you mentioned.
There are plenty of consumer-grade cloud storage services. I’m sure there are more niche ones specifically for long-term archival as well, which would usually be cheaper per bit, per-year, if you don’t need to access the data regularly.
Would you have to worry about the records of your ongoing business with these data storage providers though?
Yes that’s true. There may also be issues just with getting money out of the country to make the required payments to the storage providers. Either due to local restrictions or international sanctions.
For a somewhat recent real-world example of hiding things in this kind of situation, maybe look at how ‘paramilitary’ people in Northern Ireland hid things by putting them in walls and then decorating the wall.
Maybe some “outlet” in your house is actually the connector to the NAS sealed into a void space?
So much data has already been lost due to bitrot caused by magnetic loss and plastic breakdown. Most consumer grade storage will break down and start to lose data within a decade. Even if the data survives, will the operating system and software be available in the future to read the media? Surprisingly, the best way to preserve data long term is to print it on paper. Or write it to a gold record and send it into space.
The english wikipedia is only 100GB, so its easy to fit on digital storage, but printing it on paper is gonna take a whole building of physical space to even fit it.
You must have an amazing porn collection. You can store it on my NAS
You could look at fire safe boxes for document storage. Those are usually pretty solid. You would want to bag up the drive inside an anti static bag and probably put a couple of those little water absorbing silicone packets in there as well. If access isn’t an issue then maybe some sealant around the seams to keep it more water tight.
Magnetic tape would be better for long term storage as well I think. Those have longer storage stability. I don’t know how long an unplugged hard drive will reliably store information.
Animals could dig it up but probably wouldn’t as it wouldn’t smell like food. Depth wise I’d go for at least a couple feet deep, the traditional 6 is a surprisingly deep hole and temperature gets more consistent the deeper you go (at least with readily available tools, it eventually starts to get hot again).
Please note totally random opinion with very little experience with long term data storage. Thanks for the fun thought experiment, I hope things get better and you don’t need your backup data.
My take – OP is an anti-authoritarian time traveler. Go get em! I hope your data stays safe.
P.s. - want to drop me some winning lottery numbers? My dms are open
I’d go with optical media here. Probably multiple capsules.
- M-Disk (DVD if it will fit, otherwise Blu-ray)
- Make an encrypted archive of your data. Strong password - I suggest diceware with 8 or more words so you might remember it in 30 years
- Use DVDisaster to add parity data. You sacrifice some space, but you get error tolerance in exchange
- Wrap the disks up in good jewel cases, well sealed plastic, along with some good big silica gel desiccant packs.
- Put all that in the smallest durable, airtight container you can
- stash somewhere it probably won’t be disturbed for a few decades. Memorize.
- destroy all evidence you did this.
No way. Optical media suffer bitrot at a high rate compared to magnetic media. And the means to read it are quickly going obsolete.
That’s what the m-disk is for I assume.
I wouldn’t trust that either.
It’s specifically what they’re for. They’re designed for archival purposes.
You can spiral off into techno-paranoia if you like, but that’s just going to lead you to the conclusion that there are no solutions and nothing can be done. OP’s looking for actual solutions so that’s not helpful here.
That’s true, but for obvious reasons that hasn’t been fully tested yet. Still, for just 10-30 years, it should probably work. Certainly better than a hard drive.
There are ways to artificially “age” media by accelerating the sorts of degradation pathways they’d be experiencing naturally during storage in normal conditions.
I’m sorry, did I not provide a workable solution using magnetic media and periodic writes of new data? There’s nothing paranoid about that. It’s smart archiving.
You can spiral off into portraying my common-sense solution as hyperbolic bullshit, but that’s just going to lead me to the conclusion that you didn’t read or comprehend my recommendation. I provided an actual solution and what you said isn’t helpful.
M-Disks are rate for one thousand years. Unlike other writable optical meidaz it doesn’t use an organic substrate. It’s carbon glass, very stable.
!remindme 1000 years
What’s awesome is that no one alive today can disprove their marketing. I’ll stick with the tech that we’ve been using for decades. You know, the one about which we have lots of data how it performs and degrades. Because we’ve manufactured hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of them. How many people do you know using M-DISCs and how many of them have had them for decades? I can answer the second part: zero, as they came to market in 2009.
Just throwing the 1000 years mark is a kinda of marketing. But the cool thing is there’s actual science behind it.
But the issue with writable optical discs is that the substrate is based on organic material. These material, usually a cyano group, oxidize over time. You can help slow that does by keeping them out of the sun, prevent heat cycles, etc. But short of storing them in nitrigen they will eventually oxidize. What’s more, CDs have their data layer completely exposed on top making the problem even more pronounced. DVDs and Blu-ray at least have a layer of plastic on top of the data layer, but that’s obviously still not 100% impermeable to oxygen.
M-Discs on the other hand use a carbon glass for the data layer. Something that doesn’t oxidize. Heat cycling night form cracks in it, so yeah I would avoid significant heat/cold cycles if you want them to last, but past that they should be really fucking stable.
It is 100 years? 500? 999? Maybe, but it’s kind of irrelevant. In optimal storage conditions (which are easily achievable) they should last many lifetimes.
It’s pretty dependent on humidity and temperature, so a DVD buried in a well sealed plastic bag with a desiccant pack is actually in good conditions. No light, generally cool, and low humidity are perfect.
A hard drive has a lot of moving parts that must work and are basically impossible to replace. With optical media you’re just storing the platters, and I’m sure you’ll still be able to track down a drive somewhere. You can still find VHS players and those have been obsolete for 25 years.
This is terrible advice.Most writable DVDs degrade quickly, even if they’re stored away from sunlight and heat. Every single one of my burned DVDs from more than a few years back is completely unreadable.Update: I missed the very important line about M-DISC. This is critical. I can’t vouch for M-DISC personally, but most other optical media is garbage for archival purposes.
Do you remember what kind they were? For awhile they made them with organic dyes and those died quickly. I believe they stopped producing those, and the inorganic ones are supposed to be much better.
Yes, they were organic dyes. At the time, those were the only kind. Maybe it’s gotten better over the years.
What about tape drives? You can still get them, and I have come across articles a few times (which I can’t find on a quick search, but I only use DDG now) saying that tape drives written 30-45 years ago, carefully conserved, were still readable after all that time.
I looked into tape drives for my own backups and they don’t make sense unless you’re working with double digit terabytes. We’re talking used old enterprise gear with weird form factors and connectors, I never found something like an external USB tape drive for a reasonable price.
SCSI ain’t weird!
i think your best bet would just be to brute force it: get a bunch of different media (usb-drives, CDs, hard drives, whatever you can get your hands on and ideally from different brands) and just put the same data on all of them, then wrap in a series of plastic bags that you try to put a vacuum on, put in the most durable water and ideally airtight container you can get your hands on, then again wrap that in some plastic bags because why not.
Then bury all that as deep as you can and surround it in rocks, especially i think you’ll want a bunch of rocks on top of it. And for extra points repeat all this as many times as possible in different locations.All this is just to compound the chances that at least one of the copies of the data will survive, and even if that fails you’ll hopefully end up with enough data being intact across the different storage mediums that you can piece the data together somehow, i’m not sure how precisely you’d do that but it’s at least possible to figure out so long as the data is there.
There definitely is an advantage to different media types. Each technology has their own limitations. Tape back up, SSD, USB drive, DVD and HD with spinning platers
SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.
SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.
Huh? Why? Should SSDs not be able to contain data without power?
That’s one of the downsides of SSDs, you lose data really fast without power. Like, after a year, your data will almost sure not be intact.
No, they’ll start to corrupt within a year or two. They need to be powered to retain data.
After 30 years you can forget it.
Flash memory stores data as a voltage level, with different values being a tiny distance apart. The voltage slowly leaks out of the cells and has to be periodically topped off.
Sadly, no.
There was a recent paper on this. The failure rate was higher than expected. You’ll have to search for it; I didn’t save a link.
Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.
That’s why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.
A raid6 array across a collection of separate disks might do it.
If it’s small you might try printing the files on archival paper with archival ink. Then you can put copies in multiple safe deposit boxes. Also you could bury copies rolled up in plastic water bottles. I think those are unlikely to degrade anytime soon. Or glass bottles with plastic lids.
Don’t bury it. And don’t count on ten years. Thirty years guarantees the media won’t be physically compatible with future devices. How would you read a floppy disk from 1995 today? You’d be able to find a USB floppy drive, probably, online. Good luck having the disk be in a format that a modern OS understands. You’d need specialty software for that.
Get two spinning disk drives from major brands like Western Digital or Toshiba (not Seagate, for sure). Get different brands to reduce risk of failure from a manufacturing issue (as in, two from the same batch are likely to have the same failure if there was a production issue).
Send one somewhere abroad where it can be stored in a safe deposit box (hopefully, you know someone who lives in a free-er country). Plan to exchange it with a freshly written drive every three years. Go back and forth like this, completely rewriting the data each time to minimize the chances of bit-rot (look up this term to understand why you’re rewriting and exchanging the drives).
This will also address files formats that evolve and eventually become incompatible with future software (thinking proprietary things, not plain text, jpegs, or standardized media files). I did something similar having a family member store music that I recorded (my own, not ripped CDs) in a different state in case of natural disaster at home.
All of this can be done pretty cheap. $200 bucks should cover both drives and at least a couple of years of physical storage at a bank. International shipping will probably be the biggest cost, especially over time.
All modern OSs can read fat16 or fat32, not sure what you think floppy disks used.
FAT12, and no it doesn’t work natively. I know this because I had to replace a floppy to fix a 40 year old computer earlier this year.
You can get a USB 3.5" floppy drive working with just some special software, but a 5.25" FDD was a huge pain involving open source hardware (greaseweazle) that reads the raw magnetic flux values that then have to be run through another janky piece of software to interpret it.
Neither of those, my guy.
FAT16 was indeed used on floppy disks, my dude. It’s not remotely difficult reading them if you have the hardware.
Or just let it go. Enjoy the present and realize you can’t predict the future.
Any situation when an arrangement like this becomes useful, means you’ll have much worse and much more important things to concern yourself with.
How do you do this thing that’s important to you, the exact details of which I don’t know? I know your life and priorities better than you, despite knowing nothing about you, so just don’t care about it anymore! Then you will no longer want to do it!
Is Facebook leaking? Because this is peak condescending Facebook mommy group advice.
Not difficult, or even expensive, to find a working 20 year old machine with a 3.5" FDD. Also I work at a library and we keep a couple of well bagged USB floppy drives around for profs who occasionally need data retrieval. Hasn’t happened in a couple years though. We also have an old Dell for 5.25".
so, I would suggest talking with an archivist. Many libraries will have archivists on the payroll (Or know one, anyways) and they’d likely be happy to talk about archival methods.
personally, what I would do- and I make no guarantees that it will work for a decade- is to seal the hard drive (or whatever media,) inside a vacuum bag with a shitload of silica desiccant gel. maybe double bag it with even more silica gel, then place it inside a pelican case. if you double bag, splurge on the indicator stuff and let it sit for a week.
but I’m not an archivist, and they may laugh at my suggestion.
