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."
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
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.
"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.
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".
...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.
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.
...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!
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.
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?