Recordable blu-ray discs have a reported lifespan of hundreds of years if left untouched, but the high-capacity ones (128GB) are not especially cheap right now and I assume the writing process is slow. The drives themselves may not be easy to come by in future decades. But they are your best bet for "I want my data to outlive my grandchildren."
For the rest of us, a USB spinning rust hard drive formatted as exFAT is going to be hard to beat. You'll be able to plug this into virtually any computer made in the next few decades (modulo a USB adapter or two) and just read it. They are cheap (even allowing for the rising cost of storage), fast, and most importantly, they are easy. The data is stored magnetically, so is not susceptible to degradation just from sitting like SSDs or flash drives are.
Of course, you should not store any important data on only ONE drive. The 3-2-1 backup rule applies to archives as well: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off-site.
I recently went through this exercise and settled on HFS+ over exFAT. Reliability seems a bit better with some edge cases, and I don’t expect I’ll be put into a situation where I’m not able to read HFS+ drives.
(Though probably not appropriate if you’re primarily not a mac user, or won’t be in the future.)
I decided to go with NTFS for the filesystem as it has journaling. Works fine on Linux, and obviously Windows. For macOS there are various add-ons that support NTFS, but my use case there is read-only.
Probably depends on what “consumer-friendly” entails, how it’s stored, and the quantity of data.
If we’re talking the average tech-illiterate to literate-but-cost-and-space-constrained person, probably Blu-Ray. A burner+reader combo with a stack of dual-layer discs is probably cost-effective. High-capacity HDDs would probably be equally effective if you can guarantee that they’re stored away from accidents and mishandling, but if it requires a SATA-to-USB adapter with assembly then it might possibly be out of reach for some consumers, and any risk of damage from movement could rule it out entirely.
If we’re talking tech-savvy consumers who don’t have the IT budget of a corporation, maybe LTO-5 or LTO-6 tapes could work. Tapes themselves are very affordable and have a good shelf lifespan. Used libraries can be had for under $600. The primary issues would be finding one with an interface that works with your existing equipment and software to support tape read and write.
Consumer? Apple or Google Photos or 'drive' functionality of either. The only real risk then is losing your account and Apple Photos has an option to keep them all locally on disk.
To be pedantic, the post you responded to asked about "storage medium", not storage services, which leads to the question of what storage medium they use and how long the services will be around.
Honestly: multiple copies of encrypted cloud storage. (Encryption just for privacy.) You need decentralized backups anyway. Alternatively, two NAS systems with some RAID variation in different locations that back up each other can be more cost-effective for large capacities.
You're talking about backups which you wouldn't normally need to keep for decades and will be powered on regularly anyway. If it's archival, such as family photos for your kids when they grow up, cloud storage can lose them if you die or go to prison or for whatever reason don't keep paying the bill.
What's long-term? I have some dvd-rs that push 20-25 years and despite the plastic getting brittle they still work. I also have some ide drives that still work without problems after 40 years. I would rather aim for 20 years and upgrade the storage device if I still need to retain the data.
That's a thought I hadn't had. The plastic of the disk getting so brittle it shatters in the drive due to age. I wonder what's the embrittlement profile of polycarbonate stored in reasonable condition.
I've personally never noticed brittleness in old optical discs (unlike the polystyrene jewel cases, which often turn brittle). I don't think shattering is likely, but if it's a concern some optical drives allow limiting the maximum spin speed. If the drive supports it you can temporarily set it with the -x option of the "eject" command from util-linux.
Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.
There is a substantial difference between the standard lobbying and greasing the legislative wheels, and what's going on with this current administration.
Even if companies were pretending to play by the rules before, at least they had some need to put in the effort to pretend. When a society can see belligerent ostentatious corruption going on as the norm, nothing good can follow.
Very interesting! I hope it gets upstreamed soon, there's a ton of potential for "mental overhead" simplification in the nix ecosystem, this seems like it could be a huge help for that.
I'd imagine at some point the rig tolerances/vibrations/newly settled dust specks from snapshot to snapshot would completely negate any benefits you'd get from that level of detail. The processing power to handle that resolution would be a huge (but potentially interesting...) problem as well.
Can you please explain a bit more about why it's a difficult photogrammetry challenge, or point me in the direction of resources so I can learn more about it myself? This is an exact project on my projects list, so I'd love to have a better grounding in the topic when I get around to diving in to it.
Edit: I'm more focused on getting a dimensionally accurate/stable model, vs an esthetically pleasing one, if that matters. The hope is to be able to scan a broken chair and be able to design a jig in CAD that I could then 3d print for holding a specific piece in place while everything goes back together.
Most recent gaussian and nerf to mesh algorithms are surprisingly good at getting reasonable results for objects that traditional photogrammetry would struggle with.
The main challenge are reflective and uniform surfaces (e.g. lether or coated wood). See this overview what you'd want for perfect photogrammetry: https://openscan-org.github.io/OpenScan-Doc/photogrammetry/b... and also the challenging surfaces lower on that site
Same, which is why I asked. My naive intuition is that if you had an industrial grade turntable, like the one in the below video, you could hack together a hardware setup.
They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.
Looks very useful and very cool! Just a heads up - your graph loads terribly on mobile (android + Firefox), it's just a skinny strip in a container at the top of the page.
Thanks! Yeah the pyvis viewer isn't mobile-friendly — it's built for desktop browser exploration. I should add a note about that. Appreciate the heads up.
Aha! You might be just the person to ask about something that's I've always been curious about - are there any other types of Braille mechanisms other than the "pin on a lever arm" concept? They seem so fragile and clunky, and I'm surprised there hasn't been anything revolutionary that's sprung out of the miniaturization over the past 3 decades or so.
There are some, in particular the orbit reader[0] is much cheaper than a piezoelectric display. The trade off is that is is relatively slow to refresh and quite noisy.
There is also the dot pad[1] which is much more like a screen with a rectangle of cells that can show Braille and graphics! It is a different technology using electromagnetic actuators with latching. It can only refresh when not being touched. It's also out of the price range of most consumers, but apparently the technology scales very well so they expect the price to fall. It is also modular so users can easily replace broken cells.
The Monarch[2] is based on Dot Pad technology and also runs Android and Humanware's Keysoft software like the BrailleNotes.
I agree with Rob here,
Piezoelectric displays are expensive to build, need quiet a bit of tuning and are almost always non-repairable.
When I was working on the Tactis and researching about all the mechanism' that exists, I came across Electromegnitism based mechanisms' very rarely, It is an underexplored way of building braille displays, mainly because of the actuation problem when being pressed against, we are trying to come up with a solution in our V2. Hopefully we get there.
I'd love to see this paired up with Pydantic for a lightweight pydantic based configuration "language". Similar to CUElang, but using pydantic to describe the configuration models themselves.
reply