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.
proper archiving is surprisingly difficult, esp the time capsule idea. maybe this gets you started
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 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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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".
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 my fault you didn’t have a mom.
I did, I just learned better because mine wasn’t a condescending moron. Just condescending.
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.
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.
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?
atomic powered
Brb, gonna steal the plutonium from the Libyans.
How much data do you need to store? 1.21 Gb?
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.
