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?
As someone who has lost hard drive in the past, encrypt and back up to the cloud.
It is the safest way.
They key is to diversify. Use different types of storage media, and duplicate your efforts and bury then duplicates somewhere else.
If you can choose only 1 I would choose tape archives. Vacuum seal all your media, whatever they may be. Throw in some of those dehumidifier packets. Moisture will be your biggest enemy.
If possible, also add the means to be able to read your media after a long time. Add a couple of raspberry pi computers, vacuum sealed and dehumidified-by-packets again, and usb readers or HATs for the media you chose (though I doubt you will find a cheap tape drive with USB connection, the only option I found was £9000).
Over the years, as new technology gets developed, in particularly interface connectors that will replace USB, I would add converters if possible or just keep them around. Nothing suspicious about having some USB/sata/sas to <new technology> converter in your house.
Or, you know, you could always go with m-disc. Burners are cheap (40€ to 160€) and discs are cheap (4x 100GB costs 100€). For potentially 140€ you could store 400GB on a solid solution. Would still add a reader and devices as described above.
Most of those ideas are not feasible with a very low budget you want because eventually rot will get to the hard drive and thus making the contents unreadable. So – depending on what you want to preserve – it’s either writable media or printed out in acid-free paper or in microdot negative film, and of those methods, only print media – written, typed, from a copier, or with a laser printer – might as well be cheap.
Interesting thread.Would be interested to learn from commenters which storage media is most impervious to digital rot.
The standard (and tested for decades) answer is tape.
M-Disc might also be an alternative.
Tape needs to be stored in a controlled environment. Heat and humidity can degrade tapes. Usually you’d transfer the data to a new tape every 5 to 10 years just to be safe.
tnx for the reply, I suspected as much.
You don’t use a hard drive. USB sticks would be easier and more likely to survive I think. SD cards are another option.
But those rely on electricity to keep their bits in the right position, so leaving them unplugged for a long time means they could lose the charge on the bits.
Uhhh… I don’t know about all that. But putting something with moving parts like a hard drive into dirt unless you really really seal it well is not a good bet.
He’s right, flash media loses data as unplugged flash memory loses charge over time. It’s called charge leakage in flash memory, it’s a well-known phenomenon.
A hard drive might work, but, it would need to be stored in some sort of sealed box to keep it safe. It would probably help to also go with optical media as well, assuming we still have something able to read it in X number of years, which we should.
In general though, you’d want multiple copies, as with any data the 3-2-1 backup rule applies, so unfortunately for OP this isn’t necessarily something you can do with a very low budget.
Flash isn’t a good long-term storage option. It relies on an electrical charge to store the data, and will discharge over time. It’s literally physically storing electrons, but those electrons are constantly trying to escape. Good flash may last 7-10 years without being plugged in, but the standard off-the-shelf stuff will be dead much quicker.
Tape or M-DISC are the gold standards, though both are more expensive than flash. Tape is by far the single most resilient method; it can even be reconstructed if it is physically damaged. But it’s also the least convenient and most expensive. M-DISC is a nice middle ground. It’s essentially just a burned disc, but made with materials that won’t rot over time like standard burned discs will. So storage is as simple as storing regular discs. Though if you’re truly trying to apocalypse-proof it, you’d probably want to consider bunkering/burying them somewhere to protect from physical destruction.
Wait… Tape is more resilient than m-disc? What? How? Doesn’t tape rot or melt or decay faster than m-disc?
Good flash memory might last a decade, maybe a bit more.
Average flash memory probably won’t.
The issue with hard drives is that they tend to fail even on ideal conditions and even when powered down. Yes I’ve lost very important data to a powered down hard drive.
While it’s possible to recover information on a hard drive as long as the plates themselves aren’t damaged, that requires very expensive specialised tools and skills. Which probably wouldn’t be available in a scenario where the information on the drive would be of any value.
DVD-R (and probably consequentially Blu-Rays) aren’t any better in my experience, I’ve lost more data to DVD-R than to hard drives actually. Even when stored in low light conditions they tend to just stop reading.
However optical media has one big advantage here, is that the discs themselves are cheap, so instead of having all your digital eggs in the same basket, you spread them over several discs and while some information may be lost, others may survive.
Now, here’s an interesting thought, with digital data, the data either reads or doesn’t read, the so called digital cliff, may become partially corrupted and other parts still read, but after the corruption gets past a certain threshold all information is lost.
With analogue equipment even after severe signal degradation the contents while very deteriorated may still be perceptible, forwardermore an analogue signal is much easier to decode in the event that you need to restart
civilisationbuilding tech from scratch and don’t have access to the very very specific specifications of something like the audio codec or the filesystem.You can probably hack a rudimentary cassette player together from very simple components, all you need is a tape head (a coil), a motor (a coil and a magnet), and an amplifier (a transistor or vaccum tube). (I’m probably oversimplifying here).
Overall I think the most important thing is having redundancy, or if redundancy isn’t possible at least don’t have all eggs in the same basket, instead of having everything in a single 8TB HDD, to try spread them into smaller 512GB ones, or DVDs or flash drives or all of the above. And don’t store them all in the same location, if an area gets flooded or someone builds a building on top, you’re only losing a small part of the information.
I have a question. Is this for you in the future, or for someone who may find it? If it’s the latter, and it’s just information you want to store, not media, I’d just go with paper. Storing digital data is both hard and error prone, and it also requires them to have the technology and power to read it. If things really go to hell, this isn’t a guarantee. Paper ensures they can at least view it no matter what. It’ll degrade eventually, but it’ll hold up better than digital.
Does it need to be physical? I’d expect data on a well funded S3 account or a tar snap account to live 30 years
I wouldn’t trust cloud storage in case of a dictatorship.
I’m going to buck the trend here and suggest a really physical storage medium: Print your data out. Or laser engrave it onto sheets of metal or polymer, or whatever you want to do. If you just print pokey old black and white ones and zeros as square pixels on a sheet of 8.5x11" paper at a humble 72 DPI you can store a shade under 47 kilobytes per page without having to resort to any additional trickery. Maybe a kB or two less if you need to leave margins. How much data are you really trying to store?
In a sealed container in the dark you could easily make paper last hundreds of years (we have perfectly intact books sitting on ordinary shelves from the 1800s already), and if you wanted to print on Tyvek or something it’d probably endure thousands.
Reading this back would not be a plug-and-play solution but would have the added advantage of being a purely optical process rather than having to interface with antique storage device electronics on whatever computer you may be using 30 years from now. All you’d need is sheet feed scanner or in a pinch any sufficiently high resolution camera, and the ability to run some kind of programming environment to run a script to read those pixels back into file data.
Maybe this wouldn’t be great for archiving your collection of 4k ultra-definition porn, but it’d be absolutely sufficient for storing text and executable data for small programs, plans and schematics, other knowledgy sciency data, and even images… with the added benefit of, if any gestapo thug happens to find this early and dig it up he won’t be able to ascertain what that image is just by looking at the piece of paper.
I once heard that some printers print (almost) invisible yellow dots on pages, containing data which helps authority track down whoever printed the page. That might be a risk if the data is really sensitive.
This is true.
If you actually want to use paper… QR codes. The format is simple, broadly distributed, and has error correction built in. It’ll make the whole process a lot easier than trying to roll something yourself.
Another poster here suggested the High Capacity Color Barcode as well, which ought to already have some implementations available somewhere and sports an even higher data density if you’re willing (or able) to deal with color.
QR codes are limited to being square in aspect ratio (other than the not terribly helpful “micro rectangular QR” format) and have a maximum payload of ~3kB each. This may not be a great fit for plain consumer paper with a rectangular aspect, and you’d need to jigger some manner of batch reader so’s you don’t drive yourself insane recovering the data. Neither is an insurmountable problem; I’m just thinking out loud, here.
I’d be wary of one or more colors fading over time unless you are VERY careful with how you print these. Being monochromatic, QR codes don’t have such issues. It would likely also be easier to recover a faded QR code than a colored bar code.
Ammo can with silica gel beads.
Heavily waxed and buried in a dry place, preferably somewhere where water doesn’t flow or collect.
Sorry if this is obvious to everyone, but how would having a hidden hard disk help with living in a dictatorship?
Couldn’t you just let someone in another country take care of archiving it?
It’s 8tb of porn and the government will be banning it, and they’re hoping it’ll pass with time like prohibition did?..
If it were me, I’d be skimming a little to sell on the side to take advantage of those black market prices.
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You can not.
There is not a safe and reliable way to store digital information for such big time span while off.
The maximum you could get is some programmable eeprom and usually no vendor will bet that the information is accesible after 15 years while power off.
But once this is said, there a re few things you con do to maximize your chances.
From the technology point of view everything that is using old nand-flash technology should give you decent chances after 15 years power off. To ensure better probabilities use a fs with possibilities of storing recovery /parity/ checksum data. And try to store in a environment with minimum changes in temp, humidity and radiation (electromagnetic, solar).
And cross some fingers
Any thoughts on tape? Lto tape is designed for 10+ years
Storage media won’t survive that long. Hard drive, when used, last about 5 years, give or take. Unused, I have no idea how long the data will stay consistent but I would not count on anything beyond 10 years
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
An ammo box is probably cheaper than a pelican case. I’d go for that no matter what.
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.
