Digital Dark Ages?

angkor writes "The digital dark age--Will all the information from this computer age slowly vanish as our delicate hardrives expire? That's what it looks like. Better start printing everything out."

Comments

The solution

[bentriloquist]

Install a web server, publish everything you have, then let Google cache it...

Re:The solution

[ranulf]

I can't beleive no-one's mention's Linus Torvald's famous sig:

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;) -- Linus Torvalds

Just printing out is not enough!

[maxwell demon]

You know, bad paper holds about a hundred years only; good paper may hold much longer, but only if stored well. In a few thousand years, much of our current paper will probably have gone. And the next fire will destroy it completely anyway.

No, if your data really has value, carve it in clay and burn it. Or carve it in stone. While those methods are still not completely safe, they are at least reasonably safe.

Given the amount of data to store, we should probably build pyramids again, and carve our data into the stones of the pyramids. Given how long the Egypt pyramids lasted, this seems like a really secure way of storing the data.

Of course, I don't want to be an archaeologist in a few thousand years trying to decipher those strange texts e.g. inside the Linux Kernel Pyramid...

Re:Dark ages?

[Hektor_Troy]

I was under the impression that the defining characteristics of the dark ages was ignorance,
Witness George W. Bush, the Senate, the House and 50% of the US population.

suppression,
Witness DMCA, PATRIOT, RIAA etc.

warfare,
Witness the War on Drugs, War against Terrorism, War against Poverty not to mention all the real wars and civil uprisings around the world.

famine,
Witness Africa.

strife
Witness MS vs GPL, RIAA and MPAA vs Consumers etc

you know, BAD STUFF
Witnes Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. Now - picture them in an XXX-rated movie.

Re:just use raid-5

[AgTiger]

> and you don't have to make annoying backups everytime because of this fact.

This assumes that only one drive in the array will fail at a time, and between complete verified drive rebuilds. The Raid 5 drive arrays I've seen put together are usually built from a group of new drives, all the same drive model all purchased at the same time. I've seen enough bad production runs for various hard drives to know that it is _too_ easy to get stuck with a group of lemons.

Now imagine a lemon fails. You slap in the replacement, and think all is well, you order another hot-swappable replacement. While it's on the way, two more drives fail. To use a quote in backdraft, that little blinking light in the corner of your vision is your career dissipation light, and it just went into overdrive. ;-)

The following additional situations make me think offsite, up-to-date backups are still a VERY good thing:

- Lightning strike or massive power surge
- Water damage (pipe breaking?)
- Drop-damage (well, actually it's the sudden stop)
- Fire (I'm sure SOME companies have a Milton working for them)
- Earthquake
- Tornado
- Hurricane
- People unexpectedly parking their vehicles in your building, violently.
- Pissed off employees with physical or electronic access to the data
- Theft/burglary

And let's not forget good old human nature. "Oops, I didn't mean to delete that..."

"He who laughs last usually had a VERIFIED backup."