
Very Long-Term Backup - nreece
http://kk.org/kk/2008/08/very-longterm-backup.php
======
tom_rath
Can you buy these things?

Patek Philippe may prattle on about how their watches are meant to be passed
on to descendents, but this is something whose use is explicitly dependent
upon outliving you. Heck, losing it adds to its value!

I'm not one for knick-knacks but I'd love to own one of these. Even as a fad,
profitable sales could considerably increase their number and geographic
distribution while reducing their cost (hand made at $25k? There must be a way
to automate that!).

~~~
garethm
From the article:

 _Or you can have one on earth, if you want, acting as an additional node in
the distributed archive. There are still two disks available from this
prototype run. Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand
crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000.
Contact the office if you are interested in caretaking an archive of all
languages._

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ars
This is very cool! But I sort of think hebrew should have been given a bit
more prominence - it's the original version of the document after all.

Most of the translations are translations of translations, not direct (and
some are even 3rd generation), which will hurt analysis if you don't know
which the original is.

~~~
eru
If you do not so much care about the actual text - but about the languages,
that will be less of a problem.

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rw
For entrepreneurs:

Do guaranteed-safe data storage right and you will have a killer app. How do
you _really_ plan to last for 100 or 1,000 years? We all have lots of value
tied up in our data. Think of long-term storage as time-shifting that value,
just as files are a way of time-shifting data processing. I believe cperciva
is working on this.

~~~
derefr
If you know that you won't need it _until_ a certain date, you can just shoot
the data into space, speed it up relativistically, and slow it back down a few
seconds later--the data won't have degraded any, but the rest of the universe
will have ;)

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silentbicycle
Very cool. While the long-term storage aspect itself is really interesting,
I'm more intrigued by the different ideas for how to preserve human
communication for future and/or extraterrestrial civilizations that have no
direct contact with current languages. (Regardless of what you think of aliens
-- how would you communicate?)

* <http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html>

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI>

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stcredzero
Something reasonably priced with a guaranteed lifetime of 50 to 100 years
would sell like crazy.

~~~
gaius
You remember those big 'ol 12" laserdiscs that Phillips used to make?
Hospitals still use 'em for archiving scans.

~~~
stcredzero
How long do those last?

~~~
gaius
I've heard 100-150 years, but time will tell I guess!

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Microfiche is still in heavy use in many places. Keep it in a dark vault with
controlled temperature and humidity and it will last for 500 years.

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Herring
Or I could just upload it to google amirite?

The real problem here isn't backups. It's archaeology. Keeping the data you
want is easy - just about everyone in computing is working on some version of
that.

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culley
I understand promiscuously spreading the disks around but crashing it onto a
comet?

How are we ever going to get that one back when we need it?

~~~
TFrancis
A good question to be sure but, I don't think that we should consider that
disk as a backup intended for us. FSM forbid that something terrible should
happen to us, perhaps another intelligent species may find it long after we're
gone.

~~~
STHayden
even if we survive Languages are dieing off so fast that who knows how many
will be left 3k years from now.

~~~
stcredzero
Things will have degenerated to the point where only an offshoot of English
exists. However, this will have a vocabulary consisting only of the word
"like."

~~~
bvttf
Station!

~~~
stcredzero
Word

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tphyahoo
What do you figure are the chances something like google docs (via the GFS)
would work for this?

A bet that google will still be around in 100 years, or will buy insurance to
guarantee long term storage via some foundation if they do go out of
businesss, seems reasonable to me.

GFS does CRC and multiple copies to guard against data corruption right?

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geuis
Aliens, my dear Watson. Aliens.

