Storing Data For the Next 1,000 Years

An anonymous reader writes "This may be an interesting take on creating long-term storage technologies. A team of researchers at UCSC claims to have come up with a power-efficient, scalable way to reliably store data for a theoretical 1,400 years with regular hard drives. TG Daily has an article describing this technology and it sounds intriguing as it uses self-contained but networked storage units. It looks like a complicated solution, but the approach is manageable and may be an effective solution to preserve your data for decades and possibly centuries." Nice to see research on this using the kinds of real-world figures for disk lifetimes that recent studies have been turning up.

Comments

Maybe /. needs something that lasts a bit longer..

[Tmack]

Since those "recent studies" links have already degraded into 404's. Maybe something like what was covered a few days ago?

tm

Born for this job

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else notice that the lead researcher's name is Mark Storer? How perfect is that?

Steganography and P2P

[Chairboy]

One thing remains constant in thousands of years of recovered cave paintings, manuscripts, papyrus drawings, and more. And that constant... is pornography. It lasts, it's popular, and it's always in demand.

Clearly, the answer for long term data storage is to use steganographic techniques to encode your data into various types of creative skinpics. Pick famous folks, pretty folks, strange fetishes... the whole gamut. Pick things that people will keep. A hundred years later, all someone needs is the key phrases to search for.
"We need that Higgs Boson experiment data from 2012, how will we get it? The infocalypse has destroyed all of our cataloged data!"
"No problem, my great grandfather left a note in his journal telling his descendants to search for 'Britney spears enema' and use 'wet riffs' to decode the LHC data in whatever we use for files."
"President Spears? That's crazy!"

Voila!

Re:Only half the problem

[oGMo]

There's probably room for a lucrative business based around this-- figuring out the most elegant way to archive and retain meaningful access to data under various computing/disaster scenarios. Hey, I do consulting. :)

Find a chisel.

Re:From TFA, quite sick, really.

[DaedalusHKX]

I did. Hence why I will not put my brain inside a Tachihoma tank :)

That being said, i'm also not a fan of jacking myself up on drugs so I can "hack" wandering vehicles. I'm thinking any weapon I may wield in such a world would have to be capable of A, using some sort of warp singularity to disrupt all technological defenses of the target, and B, use that same singularity to power down the defender.

Why killem when you can simply turn them off? If that hot animated chick can kill people by fucking with their computerized brains, I can also generate singularity charges with my ham radio set and obliterate enemy cyborgs :)

Dear God, I really am overdoing the sarcasm lately, aren't I?