
Back up your precious files on ordinary paper - adulau
http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
======
mherdeg
Does anyone have a PDF of the source code? (Edit: well, good luck, folks:
<http://web.mit.edu/~mherdeg/www/paperbak.pdf>)

~~~
DLWormwood
This encoding system kind of reminds me of how the Nintendo eReader worked...
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader>

------
densh
> Redundancy helps to recover partially damaged data. Redundancy 1:5 means
> that for every 5 consecutive data blocks, if one block is completely
> unreadable, PaperBack will be able to restore it. To reduce damages caused
> by coffee pots and other common dangers, blocks are distributed around the
> page. Higher redundancy decreases page capacity but improves reliability.

Please do study error correcting codes. Most of them can offer much better
error correction with less overhead. Take a look at Wolfram's MathWorld
article [1]. This topic is heavily covered in most information theory books.

[1] <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Error-CorrectingCode.html>

~~~
maxerickson
The page claims to implement Reed-Solomon error correction:

<http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#8>

------
slantyyz
I don't know how many people remember this, but this reminds me of a
technology in the mid-to-early 80s where computer magazines offered a gigantic
QR-like code that could be scanned (if you bought the device) so that you
wouldn't have to spend any time typing in the BASIC source code.

~~~
Gormo
Oscar Databar: <http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/oscar/oscar.html>

Software was published via standard one-dimensional bar codes, and instead of
typing in the code from a book or magazine, you'd manually scan line after
line of barcodes using a specially designed hand scanner.

~~~
slantyyz
That's a good find. The one I was thinking about that appeared in Apple ][
mags was the Cauzin Softstrip:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip>

------
miahi
Dan has a nice article about this: <http://www.dansdata.com/gz094.htm>

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kabdib
Baking informaiton into clay tablets isprobably the best bit-per-year-of-
rentention technique that mankind has invented. Not sure what's second best --
ink on archival paper?

[I don't count the recordings attached to the Voyager probes. We can't easily
retrieve those.]

~~~
phillmv
Acid free archival paper kept in a dark, fire proof box is to my knowledge the
single best technology we've invented and easily at our disposal for long-term
storage.

I think I might totally start 'printing out' photos I want to theoretically
have available in fifty years and place them in a safety deposit box…

~~~
pm24601
Very true. Acid-free paper has a expected life of over 1000 years. Think about
how long paper documents like the Magna Carta, ancient illuminated bibles from
the 700's, Shakespeare's plays have survived without special climate-
controlled environments.

Also paper in bulk is hard to destroy. A stack of paper is pretty dense and
can survive to some degree a house fire or flood.

~~~
WalterBright
Aren't those documents on sheepskin? not paper?

~~~
jamesmcn
Not just parchment, but also Iron Gall Ink. Which will eat both your paper
_and_ your fountain pen.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_gall_ink>

------
mmahemoff
"bitmaps produced by PaperBack are also human-readable (with the small help of
any decent microscope). I'm joking"

Actually, tiny human-readable text is incredibly useful for verifying the data
was backed up correctly (at least for text-based files). I read about this
paper backup technique a while ago, and that was touted as one of the main
benefits.

~~~
gmaslov
Reminds me of a proposal I read about once for a time capsule -- the kind
intended to survive the fall of civilization and to help reboot it. It would
be plain human-readable text and diagrams engraved into a hard disc of some
stable material, starting out big and legible at the edges and gradually
getting smaller and smaller as it spirals towards the center, until it's
microscopic.

The text would start out as a Rosetta Stone type of thing, to try to establish
a common language. Then as it got smaller, it would describe how to grind a
hand lens so you can read further. Then even smaller text describes how to
build a microscope. Maybe somewhat further on it talks about CD-ROM drives,
and eventually transitions to /that/ format...

~~~
dandelany
You're probably thinking of the Rosetta Project:
<http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/>

...I always thought it was a very cool idea too.

------
Ingaz
Very funny. And not so impractical - send a letter with one side as
description and other as full data.

For backups I can imagine such situation: "OMG! My HDD crashed!!! Ha! No
panic! I made backups! Now I just need to restore them from this bunch of
scheets. And my restore program is on this sheet. Now .. Erm.. Hm.."

------
fiatmoney
And printing in just 3-tone color potentially increases the information
density by a factor of 8.

~~~
SonicSoul
... at a cost of durability. Tho some sort of error recovery algorithm (along
the lines of parity archive) could be used.. adding redundancy at a lower rate
than what is gained from additional colors..

~~~
duaneb
Color might be useful as redundancy: For example, one could read the data into
HSV; the bit being stored could be replicated three times, once in Hue, once
in Saturation, and once in Value. I'm not sure how practical this actually is,
especially on the radical end of those values. Also, this kind of redundancy
doesn't help against coffee spills, just printing errors, and not even well
against those.

------
mxey
Similar project: <https://github.com/penma/dpaper>

~~~
femto
And this: <http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/>

Checkout the nice picture on their home page: <http://twibright.com/> :-)

------
nodata
This is similar to "Paperkey - an OpenPGP key archiver":
<http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/>

------
scraplab
I used to run backups onto VHS tapes using a PCI/ISA card adaptor. IIRC, you
could get about 2GB on a tape, with a SVHS recorder, or 1GB on a normal drive.
Something like this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid>

Of course, it was absolutely useless. Might as well have piped the data to
/dev/null.

~~~
BCM43
Was it not possible to read the data off of it?

~~~
scraplab
It was, but I wouldn't have trusted it with anything important.

------
tcarnell
Surely if you can use colour aswell you could store LOADS more data per A4
sheet than 80 Meg...

~~~
pavel_lishin
I would be worried about yellow inks fading into white.

~~~
pattern
No one ever said yellow :) Cyan/Magenta/Green or any other trio of darker and
differentiated colors may be able to do the trick.

------
roqetman
I guess this would be useful in the case of an apocalypse scenario involving
mass EM pulses (assuming anyone is still around to build new computers with
OCR to reload the code). Better use good acid-fee paper stored at near-vacuum
though.

~~~
happywolf
If I can find a computer survived the EM pulses to scan the paper, then most
likely I don't need this paper back up anyway. On the other hand if all my
data is dead upon the EM pulses attack, I won't put too much faith on the
chance of getting hold of any surviving computer.

~~~
politician
Well, you could house your precious scanner in a Faraday cage along with a
RepRap and other "reboot the world" tech.

~~~
thebigshane
Please elaborate; I'm intrigued...

A Faraday cage will protect against an EM pulse?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage>

RepRap is a self-reproducible 3D printer? <http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap>

And so with the RepRap (and some power source/converter) inside a faraday cage
(with other physical protections as well), you're saying that this is the
ultimate backup system for worst case scenarios? Do you have any links to
provide more information about such a setup?

~~~
vacri
You seem to have answered your own questions.

Yes, the Faraday cage protects against EM interference. But so does turning
your computer off. Your main computer is fried? Pull out your old laptop and
dust it off...

~~~
iacvlvs
Would turning your computer off, help? I can see it helping for normal EM
interference, but in an apocalyptic EM pulses scenario I thought the induced
current would be enough to damage components.

------
darkstalker
I heard someone did this years ago, but with the intention of sending files
via fax

~~~
e1ven
Do you recall the name of the project? I'm very interested in finding
alternative implementations of this.

------
trebor
I can imagine how difficult source control would be when using paper: "Hey
Fred, I need sheet 7 thru 9 from revision 2.6.3!" "Which filing cabinet is it
in?"

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
So a bit like backup tapes, then? ;)

~~~
trebor
Yup, like a cassette with its tape spilling out. Just imagine dropping the
sheaf of papers on your way to the scanner!

~~~
pavel_lishin
Hopefully the papers would have some sort of index on them, so that the order
in which they were scanned would be irrelevant.

Then again, punch cards didn't.

~~~
pm24601
Punch cards were not that hard to sort after dropping them.

Once you have a deck, draw some thing on the deck edges with a permanent
marker making sure that all the card edges have been marked.

If the deck is dropped, first of all it doesn't usually scatter that much
(cards tend to stick to neighbor) and the marks on the edge help visually sort
the deck pretty fast.

------
loceng
I just thought about this today. Worse case scenarios don't seem probable,
though how devastated and delayed would life become if it did happen?

------
ehutch79
i thought we were supposed to be scanning all our important documents and
shredding them?

------
goggles99
"Olly, the author of OllyDbg, presents his new open source joke"

This page is 5 years old. Glad to see that it finally made it onto HackerNews.

------
cianclarke
Please tell me this is a troll? I mean, I know the author acknowledges the
fact this is completely unnecessary, but still - I'm no environmentalist, but
this seems to be an incredibly silly idea..

~~~
vidarh
The very first line of the page introduces it as a joke

~~~
cantrevealname
The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

I looked at the source code. It's 5,575 lines of original C code. (I excluded
the AES encryption, bzip2, Reed-Solomon, and CRC16 source code from my count.)

I imagine that he wrote the words "open source joke" as a defense mechanism
against people who would mock his efforts with lines like _"please tell me
this is a troll"_ , _"that is completely unnecessary"_ , and _"an incredibly
silly idea_ ".

Lots of people make self-effacing remarks when they introduce a work that they
know will draw criticism: "It's just a first draft, it needs a lot more work."
"I hacked it up during lunch [when it really took two weeks]." Etc.

~~~
geon
> The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

Possibly not a joke per se. But have you never written something substantial
just for fun?

