Slashdot Mirror
Company Offers Disaster-Proof Storage For Records
Makarand writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that a Utah company,
Perpetual Storage, is
offering
disaster-proof commercial storage space
deep inside a granite mountain
for companies looking to store their most important records.
The company claims that their vaults are protected
and safe from "any force known to man", including a nuclear blast.
The vaults have gained popularity
recently after hospitals, government agencies and universities have started using them to keep
their computer records safe."
I can store my MP3s and backups of Deus Ex and all of my other favorite-but-discontinued games
Perhaps a nuclear winter would be a good time to re-evaluate our social standings on something other than the size of our bank accounts.
I have been pwned because my
what if the mountain collapses?
it's in the manuals. get busy.
200 years later, archealogists find this huge store of data, locked safely away while we nuked each our city centres.
take a look at mount10 (http://www.mount10.ch/index-e.html). they offer their "data fortress" for some years now here in switzerland (where every mountain has holes like swiss chees ;).
Every now and then, when sitting in front of my comp for hours and hours, I secretly wish my house would burn up in flames, I could get rid of this hour-eater and I would not be so concerned about upgrading every year and so on.
:)
For me, that kind of mountain would only guarantee I would never get "real free time"
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
Like when the sun goes all red giant on us? How about a supernova or getting nailed by a decent sized black hole? What about gravitional collapse of the universe into a primeval atom?
Man knows some pretty awesome and irresistable forces, chief among them, in terms of data persistence, is Rose Mary Woods.
KFG
The company claims that their vaults are protected and safe from "any force known to man", including a nuclear blast.
But not including company employees.
The company claims that their vaults are protected and safe from "any force known to man", including a nuclear blast.
How about the next Kevin Mitnick?
Besides, if a nuclear blast takes out the humans and their, y'know, civilization...what good is the data?
I'm sure after a nuclear blast my first thoughts will go to whether or not my files are safe. Since it'll get boring down in that fallout shelter, so I should read paperwork on now-dead customers and play old video games on my computer. Well, at least until the generator dies.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
"Perpetual Storage -> "Long term storage"
"Disaster-proof" -> "Disaster-resistant"
"any force known to man" -> "most forces known to man, in reasonable amounts and not too close, and assuming no help from a disgruntled member of staff"
Whatever happened to truth in advertising?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Would an electromagnetic pulse-- the kind that nuclear explosions cause-- erase hard drives and thrash digital equipment in the vault?
Just wondering.
Wow! They've made a place on earth that's safe from black holes, antimatter bombs, gamma ray bursts and meteor strikes!
I wonder how much it'd cost to rent space enough for an apartment in there...
And is it safe from the S2^30 bug too?
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
My records are always getting melted by the sunshine.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
It's a mountain not a dormant volcano :)
A similar project is constantly being discussed in Nevada - that is, the burying of nuclear waste in the Yucca mountains. It might be possible to build a structure to withstand earthquakes, as it's done all the time in California. But the surrounding rock really isn't protection from an earthquake. Another thing I can't help but notice is the description of the mountain. It's made of Granite, which is an igneous rock. That means at one point there was volcanic activity there to build the mountain up. It's entirely possible the potential for volcanic activity still exists. I doubt such a structure could withstand a volcano.
Somehow I don't think the lasting impression I want to leave for future visitors to this planet is Susan from Accounts "Friday Funny".
Out of the area clients can use any available delivery service such as UPS, Fed Ex, or the US Mail.
For when your uber sensitive business data must get to the super secure storage facility safely... trust USPS and remember, pack well.
Why don't they have a couple of moderately safe distributed around the world? Each site could be orders of magnitude cheaper, and by the time the desaster is so big all sites around the world are destroyed, no-one is interested in the data anymore anyway.
...can it survive The Most Powerful Force on Earth ??
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Also, while the mountain may protect your stuff from any kind of physical catastrophe like meteors or mad bombers, it will do nothing to protect it from frothing lawyers and government agents (SCO, RIAA, BATF or whatever) or plain old industrial spies with briefcases full of cash, seeking access to the stuff from the people who run the facility. The perils of putting your goodies in someone else's care in a publicly known location are the same as those of storing your backups on someone else's computer over the net (and the obviousness of that peril is one reason why the net-backup business didn't do so well).
If you want to keep something really safe, protect it well and don't tell anyone where it is. Also, if all you're trying to protect is data, rather than physical artifacts, you're better off replicating it all over the place than trying to bomb-proof it at a single site.
In all seriousness, though they seem to have an open mind regarding material allowed to be stored, they substantially limit their potential market. For instance, "To eliminate fire risk, the company won't store paper or anything that might burn." I suppose this makes sense. But then they start turning down precious metals (and by that logic, stones such as diamonds and valuable jewelry), refusing to store cryogenically frozen human cells.
Additionally, I have to wonder about the security of the place. It only has about ten employees, which would put suspects on a short list, but at the same time gives the mountain comparatively little protection from outside attackers. Furthermore, the excavation was done only thirty or so years ago, so it hasn't yet stood the test of time. Not long ago, they completed some more major construction adding second and third floor mezanines...I have to wonder as to whether or not any of this has affected the structural integrity and to what extent. Of course, the southwest isn't exactly the most stable region either...earthquakes are many.
But let's put all of that aside for a moment. We have a company that has its eyes on the future!
Merry Christmas,
Scott
><>
No, I didn't burn my house, but I sold/gave away all my four computers. I was just so damn tired of wasting time on something that would never be complete. The noise of the fans and the hopeless snake-pit of wires and dust in the corner were also contributing factors.
My computerless life lasted for about 6 months and was, in general, a nice experience. Then I got a nice, silent computer with a flat screen.
The owls are not what they seem
They have several vault sites where they keep the works of Elron Hubbard preserved. Quite elaborate and expensive. Seems redundant, you can find all the used copies of Dianetics and Battlefield Earth you could ever want at 2nd hand books stores.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Iron Mountain (who are the big boys in record management and offsite storage) has this to say in the fist paragraph of their corporate history:
Iron Mountain has come a long way since the 50's, when a depleted iron ore mine in upstate New York was converted to the United States' first secure underground records storage center designed to protect corporate vital records in the event of a nuclear holocaust.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
FYI, the site's running Windows XP, unpatched.
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
... to conduct my Experiments with Evil!!
Muhahaha... MUHahaHA... Merry Christmas Everybody!!
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
It'd be a good way to get a message through to your great great great great great great great great great grandchildren. Not easy to do.
All organizations managing critial data has a need for a robust and reliable IT practice - nothing is more important than medical records. But storing data in granite valuts doesn't mean much if you don't know what the quality of your data, and it doesn't help you if you need to recover data in near real time.
Many CIOs in the IT industry simply don't understand the need or purpose of IT. That's why some organizations have CIOs find it acceptable to "rarely lose records", or to have "occational network outage".
Long term storage can't help organizations that simply don't have a good IT practice.
I think a great example is Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. This often-told story of a four day network outage at a large hospital has been passed off as a problem caused by a lone researcher and a poorly programmed router.
Nobody looks at the bigger picture - what are the REAL potential issues with this IT system? Was there something on the magnitude of a nuclear blast taking away the hospital's IT infrastructure? Or were there simple, systemic problems within IT that were not properly addressed by the CIO and upper management? In almost every case, it is the later.
It all comes down to high level responsibilities. Most IT directors feel they are not responsible - they don't know how to see the issues with the "big picture". The "big picture" they can see is a nuclear blast! It's almost laughable.
Some CIOs would rather blame a lowly worker or the vendor of a piece of equipment instead of blaming the problem on a serious-but-mundane issue within the IT organization they are responsible for.
No wonder why IT in the USA is in such a bad state.
It's safe from any force known to man, yet here we go, slashdotting their server, making quick on-line retrieval of even the tiniest record impossible.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They need to update their physics textbook. Modern forces at work include Bureaucracy, Incompetence and Government.
I'll bet any one of those three could breach this fortress ...
... mostly company business records on computer tapes and microfilm.
See Pedler, K. & Davis, G.
The Viking Press, New York, 1972;
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters
Or some nanobots wreaking havoc for the more hardware type of things.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Am I the only one who thinks if we fall victim to nuclear blasts are car insurance records are the least of our worries?
Good ol' Americans. Always thinking with their greed, er lust for power, er... American dream...
one of us. one of us. one of us.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
A lot of european banks use this service from a swiss company. This company bought some old bunkers from the swiss gouvernment.
Companies store tapes, harddisks, or hole computer systems there for desaster recovery.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
...I have a feeling I'll be reading about this in "The Doghouse" section of Crypto-Gram sometime soon.
I think Schneier makes a special point in Beyond Fear that extreme terms like "absolute security" and "any force known to man" don't even make sense in a security situation. They are only used by people who don't understand security in the first place!
Hilarious!
you really need to provide a source (URL? newspaper?) for this!
I wonder of solid granite is strong enough to protect against social engineering...
OK, just digesting the excessive Christmas feast, so until I am able to move my body again I thought I would browse through /. , expecting little activity. Simoniker, get out of your bedroom and go and spend time with the family...
... how about idiot proof?
I keep all my vital info woven into posts, and hidden right here, its the only place I know that won't get ./'ed.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
"No city is impregnable into which an ass, laden with gold, can be led."
Most people here are missing the point. These things were orinially built to house the geneology data for the LDS church to survive serious biblical type disasters. This is for like, the end of the world comes and were diggin out, and your data is still there.
I can't believe some of the idiots responding to this saying "this is useless because it doesn't allow restore in near-real-time".
At the other end of the sepctrum is the idiot who is worried about volcanoes in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Please people, get a clue before posting.
Remind anyone else of Cryptonomicon?
This place is using old missle silo's for data storage. I just think it was an interesting use. A swords to plowshares kinda thing.
If the data was that important, I don't think I could trust anyone to hold on to it for me. For important things, I'd keep them in underwear, where no one would dare take it from. Emails, contact information, etc. No wait. The most important thing already IS in my underwear. =D
When testing, you should always mount a scratch mountain!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
When I first read that, I was thinking someone wanted to help me keep my vinyl safe. I have a 45 of Chicago's Questions 67 & 68 in mint condition that I would gladly store there...
Do you have ESP?
I feel a sense of relief knowing that, should a nuclear war take place, Kentucky Fried Chicken will have stored their secret recipe safely.
Jeez. Talk about glass half empty. I'm hoping that it's not gonna happen for at least 90 minutes, when my Xmas roast is ready for consumption.
Happy [xmas|holidays|blah]
What are they going to do when the Water Chip fails? Send Darl out to find one?
mostly just fluffy greed/fear/ego based ?pr? ?firm? scriptdead last gasper corepirate nazi execrable hypenosys designed to take yOUR eye off the 'ball'/stuff that really matters?
man.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
...will be spending my time in the fallout shelter playing Wasteland, Fallout, Fallout 2 and nethack.
When the world is safe to roam again, we'll see who has the experience points, stats and skills necessary to survive in the real world!
Naturally, this has been a great problem for my anscestors, with looters and archaeogists plundering our graves. First, we tried similar a similar long-term storage system in a huge man made stone polyhedron, but this was too conspicuous and attracted robbers. Then, we tried vaults hidden in a valley, but the robbers scoured the entire area, destroying the afterlife hopes for countless of my ancestors.
Maybe this system, at the center of a real mountain, perpetually guarded by corporate rent-a-cops, will finally ensure the endless afterlife that we strive for. I'm going to have them send me a brochure.
The LDS Church already stores records in a mountain vault in Utah. The records are various records that the church has obtained for storage and use in their Family History Library and Centers.
Granted, Most of the records in the vault are dated before 1930 but this idea is really old.
I couldn't help but think of a silly movie called "Cypher"
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
I know of these:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Vault in a mountain? I'd feel much better with a backups distributed in ten or so places across the earth or maybe some flash memory in a geosynchronous satellite.
Funny thing is tape technology changes so rapidly that the old stuff can no longer be read as the drives break and/or they are discarded.
Yeah, after all, those little rounds floating in the atmosphere don't do anything at all.
Why would it need to be a decent sized black hole? The smallest black hole physically possible is enough to completely obliterate our entire solar system, and then move on to destroy some more.
Nerd.
Until the early 1980s, DEC used to have its own underground facility. I think it was in Burlington, MA, if memory serves. It was then sold to Iron Mountain.
Tough to find pictures of these things.. they don't exactly want to draw attention to themselves.
How about biological infection?
There's a well-known case where most of the tapes stored in one of these granite mountains were found to have been infected by a fungus that simply adored the tape medium- and rendered most of it unreadable.
This isn't anything new. These granite mountain dealies have been around since the 60's-70's..even earlier, actually- Hitler's V2 factory was entirely inside one of these mountains.
Please help metamoderate.
Save your data, when YOU and YOUR FAMILIY are dead?
Human Life is more important that Fortune 1000 Company's data, we just have to make them understand we think so. And, besides this, those supposed safe places, are not safe from viruses, HD crashes, stupid clueless assholes that doesn't know how SQL, etc,etc,etc. I think tape or net Backup is still the cheaper and better way.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I dunno. Maybe the redhead in those match.com ads knows.
Please help metamoderate.
After the dollar has lost 50% of its value over three years against the euro, it seems that fear is now the most reliable currency in the US.
Two Words: Asteroid Impact
Assuming they have a fat pipe out to the internet to get all that data in there, I suppose a single un-patched windows machine in the mountain could be vulnerable to a host of malacious things.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It can withstand a nuclear blast, but what about an MS "blast"? And what if they catch the virus before microsoft decides it's time to put out an update. I guess they should just use linux which is resistant to kryptonite
Perhaps we should pause for just one second in our technological discussions of permanent storage of data and ask the more important question of WHY it is necessary to store data permanently.
Permanent data storage means inability to correct the mistakes that are part of the storage record. With the epidemic of identity theft currently out of control, and the lack of standards concerning who collects data, what type of data, and its ultimate use, it is foolish and dangerous to permanently store what is often wrong and low quality data.
Nor should we forget that ultimately all data is collected for political or commercial reasons, and in the West, these are often the same things. Permanent data storage is one of the foundations of permanent institutional political structures, which is just another name for fascism.
Ever had a computer glitch destroy your credit? Are you a one of the millions of John Smith, Jin Kim, Jean Martin, Abdul Mohammad, or other people who share a common name with tens of thousands of other people? Suppose you're Juan Lopez and some twit in the Migra transposed a couple of numbers on immigration form twenty years ago and now every time you cross the US border some fuckwit demands to stick something up your ass for 'National Security'.
And nobody or no amount of money can ever change it because the records are permanently and unalterably stored in a nuclear bomb proof mountain somewhere?
A company by that name used to do this, in a former iron ore mine.
This would offer the benefit of some magnetic shielding, from an EMP pulse.
For most companies, a single tape cartridge, or other removable media (cdrom, dvd-rom) will hold the most critical data, and fits just fine in a safety deposit box, at the bank. Or if your not that paranoid, in a box under the CEO's bed.
The Bunker, in Britain, offers bombproof web hosting, in their underground data center inside an underground military base. Starting from 125 pounds per month for a dedicated 1U server. Linux hosting available.
Sweet, sounds like an awesome place to store my nuclear bombs!
(for the humor impaired: are the assumed innocuous items in storage safe from each other?)
The site www.perpetualstorage.com is running Roxen/3.3.63-release2 on Linux.
As a system administrator I pay an arm and a leg to put my data inside a granite canyon so it can withstand any force known to man.
Then a big disaster happens and me and everyone in my company dies.
At that point our disaster recovery options are as follows:
1) an alien life form to arrive on earth, rescue the data from the inside of a granite canyon, and decide to stay and run our business
2) a primitive life form on earth that was strong enough to withstand the big natural disaster, evolves over millions of years, then rescues the data from the inside of the granite canyon and decides to run our business
Neither scenario seems likely. But to keep the CEO happy we should probably use those good quality HP LTO tapes to make sure the data is still around in a few million years.
If this isn't an ad, I don't know what is. There are dozens of companies that do this, or similar things. Anybody who's been working in the IT world for any length of time already knows that they can get this type of storage.
The biggest storage risk remains: incompetent storage employees. Used to work at a company with many decades of chemical experiments, all printed out on paper by the instruments. All stored away at a company with a Mountain-like name.
Finally decided to (a) destroy some old records, and (b) optically-scan some we didn't have in digital form. Turned out, most of the records we'd been paying to preserve, didn't exist. Their claim was we had sent them a letter, asking to destroy the records... but they couldn't produce it.
No refund for the archival costs of the destroyed boxes, either. And I don't know why some boxes they could find were water-damaged. What the heck were we paying for?
So, periodically check on your archival records. Mountain or not, they're not safe!
I am the only one who thought, reading this, "Will the construction be done by GOTO Engineering?"
(If you haven't read Cryptonomicon: this is completely unrelated to a "GOTO statement" in programming languages.)
- Tal
- Tal Cohen
I'd like to point out that no vault is safe from having its water purification chip break down.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
where does the Swiss military store their important records?
It couldn't cost them that much to put in some fiber and some extra racks alongside and separate from their servers, and having an army guarding your stuff has to be hell of a selling point.
If I recall correctly, Fort Knox is right next to the main armored warfare training center for the U.S. Army. Even if you could get enough dynamite and dump trucks on site, getting away from a bunch of 20 year olds that have these nice new toys can't be that easy.
My personal records are not that important. I don't really care that much. But, if it is really important, you need something more than what this company is offering.
Let's face it, these guys would quit if it wasn't profitable to run their business. I want my important stuff to be guarded by an institution that will be around for it's own non-profit reasons.
The Swiss army or a U.S. armored division will do nicely.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Saddam's bunkers were nuclear blast proof. they weren't smart bomb proof. many structures that can withstand the overall pressure of a nuclear blast can't withstand the directed highly targetted force of todays conventional weapons. Besides, the real question isn't whether they can withstand a nuclear blast, but whether they can withstand a court order to be removed.
In God we trust,
everyone else we firewall!!
I'm planning to store all my company's records in good old Yucca Mountain in neighboring Nevada. If it's good enough for 77,000 tons of radioactive waste, then it's surely good enough for our old personnel records, customer information, and accounting files.
Never make it a challenge, now all the James Bondesque thieves have taken the challenge, and even now are readying their special equipment :-D.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Thats a pretty powerful 'known force'...
Perhaps i can safely store my MP3's in there...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
it will survive those phenomenom.
Honest, if not you can get all your money back. Just give us a call.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Volcanoes in Little Cottonwood Canyon would be a serious biblical type disaster.
;)
really.
Now, where do I sign up so I can have a backup of my game files?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Perpetual storage, unlike perpetual motion, is a snake oil, which has never been patented!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
yes, but then they'd also have to blow up the secondary backup facility. Any company using this ridiculous amount of storage would be sure to at the very least keep a working backup on hand.
Photos.
The surprising thing is how increadibly cheap they are (compared to how much you would THINK this would cost). It was actually rather refreshing to deal with them in this age of over priced under featured piece of crud business "IT" products.
For those who are saying "can't someone just drive a car bomb down the tunnel?" What the story neglects to mention is there are two 90 degree turns inside the tunnel that should stop the shockwave of a nuclear blast, let alone some whimpy car bomb.
Ever hear of iron Mountain (http://ironmountain.com/)? . It's called Off Site Storage and it's been around for years. Arcus, owned by Iron Mountain, had a vult underneath the WTC until the first bomb hit then they moved most of it to NJ. LOL I worked in it cranking out Foxpro code.
This would be an excellent place for me to store my bottle cap collection.
I wonder how they would go about protecting old records (of the tangible vinyl type). I was under the impression that those records were in danger of disintegrating over, say, a century, and the audio contained on them was being destroyed.
Ask me about repetitive DNA