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?
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.
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.
Is Facebook leaking? Because this is peak condescending Facebook mommy group advice.
Not my fault you didn’t have a mom.
I did, I just learned better because mine wasn’t a condescending moron. Just condescending.
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.
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".
Holy shit toshiba hard drives are fucking awful, and floppies are still not hard to read today.
I swear it’s half the reason people are mad at Synology. There is no way to buy a “Synology” drive without the chance of getting a Toshiba drive, just return and reorder until you get decent drives.