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Ask HN: How would you make a service to store digital files for 500 years?
6 points by chippy on March 12, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments
Lets say you wanted to set up an organisation or archive that promised to keep documents, images etc for at least 500 years. You could charge clients money to store stuff. Material can optionally made public, and/or set to be public after a certain date (e.g. expiry of copyright). The organisation should be expected to continue to operate in future years and receive material. The archive should be resistant to geographical political and technological upheavals, but operate in compliance with international laws. The key selling point is that unlike every other service that has been before, this will never stop hosting it.

Technology: How would you choose the right tech to ensure durability and stability over time. I imagine things would need to be upgraded, but things do degrade as well. I'm possibly thinking it may also offer a premium service to offer real cold storage to store digital material even to survive a global catastrophe. How should such things be stored?

How would you set up the organisation? Should it be non profit?

How would it be funded? I expect most clients would want to pay initially, but I also expect the clients and their organisations to have gone extinct before the 500 years are up. Ownership would probably be done via legal deeds.

How could a guarantee of at least 500 years be granted now if the organisation doesn't have enough funds to set everything up.

How would an organisation be established which could guarantee the mission from the start? Far too often we see noble and good technology companies get compromised over time. How can this be resistant to that? I imagine it would be running when I die, and when my successors die. How can I ensure, now, that the organisation continues with the same mission?

What would be the best way to set up the infrastructure to be resistant to political upheavals around the world, whilst still abiding by international laws? (e.g. copyright).




Create a religious non–profit, the Order of Librarians. The Order of Librarians will assess the merit of the donated information for perpetual salvation.

Digital donations must be accompanied by some monetary amount. All copyrights and intellectual properties (patents, whatever new nonsense is created in the future) tied to the donated information are assigned to the Order of Librarians in perpetuity. The Order of Librarians is authorized to use the donated information in any way they see fit that helps perpetuate the information (so selling access to it, placing ads on it, whatever).

And it must be a legitimate religious organization, with whatever rituals and hymns and methods and beliefs will be used by governments to decide what is or is not a religious organization. The central belief is something like the value of the documents is sacred and must be maintained.

And yet there is nothing you can do to guarantee any of this would last a century, let alone 500 years.

Look to the history of the Catholic Church, solely because it's one of the few (European) institutions that have outlasted various regimes over millennia. And even the Catholic Church has had "winners" and "losers" over the millennia, with various documents and books being retained while others have been intentionally purged.


I'm assuming you've already familiarized yourself with the Long Now foundation (https://longnow.org/) and the Internet Archives long term efforts…


I like Long Now - I'm just not convinced it will last beyond the lives of the present members and celebrities lives...

Do you know if they have addressed my concerns? I'm sure my idea is not new


I don't know that they've addressed your concerns but they're one of the few organizations publicly documenting their thought process, what they've reviewed, rejected, and accepted.

The crux of the problem is going to be finding someone or some organization who cares about preserving information on that timeline. Aside from a non–profit the only pragmatic option is a governmental organization or NGO of some sort, with all of the attendant problems that come with that.

No capitalist based corporation is going to be able to make a 500 year commitment when the CEO and board are evaluated on quarterly returns.


I think there has been some research on longterm digital storage. I think there was one that encoded info onto glass, which supposedly doesn't have the same longterm (centuries) storage concerns.

You could probably warehouse the data in something like the world's seed banks - bunkers distributed around the world to preserve the genetic material. Technically you could even store the data similarly since there has also been research on DNA data storage.


The problem is not storage. We have the tech that will store data for centuries. e.g there is research to store data in diamonds [1] for long term storage. The problem will be on how to ensure the data format is readable after a few decades.

Already we are seeing this problem where file formats used just a decade ago are no longer readable because the software to access them do not work on the new systems. In a century this problem will be a lot more pronounced.

One way around it would be to have all the data transcribed to the latest format every few decades or have the software/hardware to read the data in the archive as well along with instructions on how to build the hardware.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600911


That doesn't seem like such a big problem. There are many systems/games/software that have emulators for them on newer systems.

The biggest issue is forming an organization/government that will persist for 5 years and not change it's stance on data preservation.


This asks how to convince others to trust a company or an organization. The "selling point" is there, but HN is to provide actual arguments.

The underlying basic idea is to just talk the customers into that. Usually it suffices. Heavy upfront investment tends to end badly, doesn't it?


Nobody can guarantee anything beyond their own lifetime, and it would be a silly and unverifiable thing to guarantee anyway. Especially for data.


leverage the streisand effect


how do you mean?




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