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I new verson of something like paperdisk http://www.paperdisk.com/index... would be neat Ive always wondered how much extra data you could store if you used colors too.

But it still does not stop a determined attacker. Most computer environments are turing complete to their users. It is trivial to do something like paperdisk and print it. Or use steganography and no one will notice.

Storing digital pictures as barcodes comes as... odd to me. I have an idea: why not print them out and store the paper on which they are printed inside the time capsule ?!?

Three main reasons (well a fourth one too) :

- Data types.
Printed picture can only store picture.
2D barcodes could store anything that can have a digital representation : audio (kids singing a song could be fun), video, etc.

Given the current speed at which format evolve, are phased out, and replaced be something new - The only alternative to store audio would be to write it in grooves (vinyl discs ?) and count on the fact that building a proper player is a sunday after noon project requiring nothing more that a paper cone and a needle.
(Basically the same idea of "don't use hitech, use something stupid that you could manually re-extract" as the 2D barcode vs. current storage device)

- Data density.
Basically you store 1 picture per sheet of paper. Whereas paper disk claims 1MB raw per sheet of paper with their technique. And probably more recent algorithms using higher DPI could even squeeze more raw data per area of paper. (Specially because most of the popular current 2D barcode are designed to be readable even with crappy webcams of current phones. Whereas, the current project could use whatever is best (good hi quality scanner) and will anyway be extracted after 25 years by which time huge quality improvement are to be expect - crapphone will probably have sufficient quality cams, if they still exist around).
And that's raw capacity, before compressing the data.

- Data redundancy.
With printed-out picture, the only way to have redundancy is to print 2 copies of each picture, and the only way to restore them is to carefully cut'n'past bit using an x-blade and glue.
Once you are digital there are lots of ways to reduce the impact of degradation : be it reed-solomon style redudancy so missed bits won't matter, or larger scale redundancy (a-la RAID style XOR blocks).
The resulting increase of space requirement is much smaller than printing everything 2x, and leaves more room in the box for more data sheet and thus even more documents.

- Colours.
To have a printed photo survive 25 years, you have to print it with inks that will remain stable for all that period, including retaining the exact intensity and hue.
Even old black and white photographs have turned brown currently.
And if you want to print colour picture today, you'll have to have 4 different paper inks that will have to stay exactly the same for 25 on a paper substrate. Otherwise you'll have a smeared blurry pale picture.
Whereas, with 2D barcode, you'll probably only need 1 single colour (black or whatever is the most stable) and only keep it distinguishable between painted and un-painted dot - as it's only digital. The shades don't matter. And in case somewhere the ink has definitely became unreadable, see above post about redundancy.

These guys beat you to it:

http://www.paperdisk.com/

Sounds like a rehash of the old SoftStrip concept, only now it works with the now-ubiquitous flatbed scanner instead of a special reader device.

(Hmm...some issues of Nibble had their programs included in SoftStrip format as well as printed source listings. I wonder if anybody ever came up with a program that'd read SoftStrip data from a scanned image.)

These guys beat you to it:

http://www.paperdisk.com/

Use PaperDisk! http://www.paperdisk.com/aboutpd6.htm Go to Staples, and get this: http://www.staples.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/S taplesProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051 &langId=-1&productId=119926&cmArea=SEARCH There you go... 2GB for $3.84!

Remember, there was some rule, stating that your data will always take 100.1% of your available storage space. Now you can encode the remainder using Paperdisk and write it on the surface, then read it back with a common flatbed scanner!

Stock up on printer paper and ink cartridges.

Come to think of it, you may want some filing cabinets as well (Only ~1.5 mb per 8.5x11 sheet).

Depending on how you do it, you can get a lot more than the density that you assume. Check out www.paperdisk.com.

That said, this method would still be more than twice as expensive as storing data on hard drives, would still require a million pages, but would take a little under 2 weeks to print.

It still doesn't seem like a feasible option.

The up-side is that, if stored properly, the data would likely be safe potentially for many hundreds of years.

There is paperdisk to do exactly such things. Includes redundancy so that you can stain your data prints without losing data (hopefully).

However, this is an old patented windows crippleware application, therefore not suited for the /. crowd :)

Something like this might be better? (previously posted on /.)

Paperdisk

Link credit not mine, linked to earlier in the topic by Annonymous Cownerd

Does this remind anyone else of Paperdisk? Paperdisk