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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Probably want to encode it on a WORM tape. (Suggestion used LTO drives on eBay)
Then store it in the centre of a sealed medium
irongalvanized metal box filled with silica. (Take care not to damage the tape, without trapping moisture.)I’d imagine it would work well if you can keep the hardware to use it functional.
Hell, encode it into stone tablets. Those would last forever, but read time would be awful.
“Bring me the tablet”
“No, not the ipad, the stone tablet that I buried underground”
Oops, I found the wrong tablet and invented Mormonism instead. Sorry.
proper archiving is surprisingly difficult, esp the time capsule idea. maybe this gets you started
Any thoughts on tape? Lto tape is designed for 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.
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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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.
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.
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.
tnx for the reply, I suspected as much.
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.
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
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
Ammo can with silica gel beads.
Heavily waxed and buried in a dry place, preferably somewhere where water doesn’t flow or collect.
