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Ask Slashdot: Protecting Data From a Carrington Event?
kactusotp writes "I run a small indie game company, and since source code is kind of our lifeblood, I'm pretty paranoid about backups. Every system has a local copy, servers run from a RAID 5 NAS, we have complete offsite backups, backup to keyrings/mobile phones, and cloud backups in other countries as well. With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately, I've been wondering: is it actually possible to store or protect data in such a way that if such an event occurred, data survives and is recoverable in a useful form? Optical and magnetic media would probably be rendered useless by a large enough solar flare, and storing source code/graphics in paper format would be impractical to recover, so Slashdot, short of building a Faraday cage 100 km below the surface of the Moon, how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?"
First step is to stop listening to the hype. Yes it would be bad for the large power distribution infrastructure but no solar flare is going to erase optical discs that doesn't also wipe out most life on the planet. It isn't going to erase hard drives that aren't destroyed by the power events that happen in the first few minutes. So a copy in your safe will still be readable. Remember, the safe is metal and entirely enclosed. In other words it is a Faraday Cage. I really don't know how flash memory will react to a strong electro-magnetic field but my money on it also surviving so long as it isn't connected to anything when the balloon goes up. Kinda hard to induce much of a voltage across nanoscale features. And these observations also apply to an EMP attack.
It things really get bad you might have trouble finding a working system to connect that backup to and electricity to start it up with but if it gets that bad you won't be worrying about the source code to some damned game, you will be worried about God, Gold and Guns at that point.
While making those elaborate plans to protect your data you might also want to take a few precautions to ensure you are there to need that data when the dust settles. Do you have a bug out bag? Is it fresh? Do you have an escape plan? Odds are that if you are an indie game dev you live in one of the hives where venture capital can be found and everyone there is toast within days; the trucks stop rolling when the gas pumps stop working, the shelves empty and canibalism begins. Do you have a destination in mind? Do you have a few days of survival supplies stashed to allow you a chance to get to it?
Democrat delenda est
With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately, I've been wondering: is it actually possible to store or protect data in such a way that if such an event occurred...
So you're worried you might go extinct or even worse... expelled?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, this is one of the most retarded questions to date and that's saying something for an "Ask Slashdot" question.
The only mechanism I can think of which would case a solar flare to render optical disks unreadable would be radiation damage. A solar flare which delivered that kind of dose would likely wipe out all life on earth so you probably wouldn't be worrying about your backups.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
...your small indie game company is the least of your worries.
Punch Cards.
If such an event destroys all the computer media on Earth, nobody can buy or play your game anyway.
But maybe you can use punch cards?
If you are that worried about it you could look into some old technology like paper tape or punch cards.
I once toured one of THE TWO UPS datacenters that could run for a week on its own diesel generators. They figured that after a week, they could get more fuel to their generators if need be, but you also have to think that if things are so bad that critical infrastructure like the UPS operations cannot get power back after a week, then there is probably a disaster so big that the data might not mean much to anybody for much longer.
In the same way, if things are so bad with data drives and computers being destroyed everywhere in the world, who do you think is going to give a crap about being able to play your game?
How would optical be wiped by e/m radiation? As for magnetic, as long as there is no physical damage taking place (I'm no Carrington event specialist, but it doesn't seem as if high energy particles do the damage, just warpage of Earth's magnetic field (someone can correct me if I'm wrong)) wouldn't any old Faraday cage do? I wouldn't be surprised if the metal drawers in safety deposit boxes would be sufficient.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Wrap your USB flash drive in aluminum foil. You are all set. For extra points, make an aluminum hat to keep out the bad thoughts.
http://olydbg.de/Paperbak/
In theory, if civilization is destroyed by the Flame Deluge, the monks should be able to reconstruct your data on paper using nothing more than a magnifying glass.
A steel box is a perfectly good Faraday cage. Its a small antenna cross section, so you'll effectively get no effects inside the box.
So if you are paranoid enough to care, just keep a backup of your data in your safe. Which you want to do anyway, since that helps mitigate many many many more risks to your data than a big solar storm.
Test your net with Netalyzr
http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
I think people should really be designing for a more plausible and real world scenario that happens far more often. The man made scenario known as a court order. Companies like Ontrack do far more business recovering data for court order subpoenas than they do for floods or fires.
Seriously, you can put your data on RAID 6 arrays to mitigate against disk failure. You can back up your data to mitigate against a disaster at a site. You can distribute your data to multiple sites to mitigate your risk from flood or hurricane or similar disaster.
Can you comply with a court order seizure of your data, hand over everything that is required and still operate? If you can do this than you have a pretty good disaster recovery plan. If you can't do this than you don't have a good disaster recovery plan and it's the one disaster than in the real world strikes businesses more often than just about anything else.
Yes, I have been involved with this kind of thing more than once, and you really don't want to mess about a court order.
how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?
Ban reruns of Dynasty on TV?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Unless your computer is in an all-acrylic case, the metal shell acts as rather a nice Faraday Cage. Given that the atmosphere protected most of the equipment on the ground during the last event (Bastille Day, 2000) you should be just fine. And finally, as the last one was in 2000, and they're due every 500 years, you'll be good for a while.
The geomagnetic effects of a solar storm is very large, in terms of physical extent, but still relatively slow, small changes in terms of magnetic field amplitude. In a crude sense, you can think of the voltage induced in a loop of wire from a changing magnetic field. The voltage is proportional to the area, size of change in magnetic field, and how fast the field changes (inversely proportional to the time the change takes). The second and third factors are already quite small. The only reason it affects power grids, is due to their large size, allowing for a accumulating the effect of magnetic field changes over a wide area. This isn't going to affect small devices on the surface of the Earth, short of temporary power loss and possible loss of satellites from increased particle flux in space.
So how do you protect equipment like hard drives and computers from geomagnetic storms? Don't hook up antennas to them that are miles long. Or if you do plug them into the power grid, protection circuits are pretty simple for over voltage issues. So simple, a lot of power grid equipment has such circuit breakers, which is the reason they probably will go down from a major storm: not from damage, but from protection circuits pulling the plug when conditions go too far out of spec.
To paraphrase:
On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if the surface of the Earth is fried by a solar flare and all computers are rendered inoperable, how can one protect a video game?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a need.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
If such an event deleted all your backups, then you would be without of business anyway as everything would go offline...
So, continue with your normal backups and go spend your free time to relax...
Let's just get the promotion out of the way.. sigh.. what's the name of your game company and what game did you just release?
May I ask what exactly you plan to do with this source code after every IC on the planet has been rendered inoperative? You will likely have other priorities following such an event.
It would be incredibly paranoid to think that a solar flare would destroy hard drives and OPTICAL DISKS but if you want to allay your fears cheaply, burn copies of your source code on a DVD, then onto a hard drive, then on an SSD hard drive, and then onto a USB key drive. Then apply for a safety deposit box at a bank that holds them in the basement. A basement bank vault will serve as a very good Faraday cage indeed. Having the data stored in multiple forms would help against a solar flare.
NOTE that you have traded security of one sort at the expense of security of the other sort. With so many copies of your company's lifeblood floating around, you are at risk of having that information getting stolen. Most people use trade secrets to protect their code. If you are careless about it, and let everyone keep a copy of your source code, then it's really not a "secret" and that's a prerequisite to asserting "trade secrets". Therefore, you should minimize the number of copies floating around. Centralize all the source code onto a server with a RAID array. Put access control methods onto the RAID array. Make an on-site backup onto a separate RAID array. (For instance, the server should have a RAID 5 array, and it should back up onto a NAS with a RAID 5 array.) Make off-site copies of the backup server. For instance, put an encrypted copy of the backup onto a HDD and drop that off into the bank vault.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
So, the big event happens, many people are dead and all computer technology has been wiped out.
How to properly prepare your backups? The trick is to really think about what is the core mission of your company... obviously, you build games now so the company will survive.
So how to ensure the company will survive in the event most customers are dead and computers nearly non-exstant? Quite obviously, it is to be the leaders of the next rise in civilization.
This means ensuring a good supply of arms, and training for each person in the company so that you can arise as the natural leaders from the ashes of civilization.
You should probably also harden the building, and lay in a year of food so the company can sit safe while civilization steadies into a steady state outside. To ensure you can really hold out that long, make sure your company is housed in a large building with a flat roof, that no-one can see from the outside (a 10 foot extension to the walls on the roof may work). Then put enough dirt on the roof that you can grow crops and raise goats/chickens.
As a game company you stand a better chance of ruling civilization than most. You'll have better reflexes, and of course who has thought more about post-apocolyic matters than a modern game developer?
Good luck, and I look forward to living in servitude under your wise rule.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So you're telling that you've essentially multiplied by several factors the attack surface for whoever might want to steal your blood...sorry your code ?
If you're REALLY that paranoid, you should evaluate the risk factors and protect against large probabilities.
As such you're not looking like someone who wants to protect the code, but someone who wants to protect himself against blame. Start being efficient.
Two things
1. Don't buy too much into the hype. You've got multiple backups across multiple locations. That's about as good as it gets.
2. If you really believe magnetic and optical media won't protect your data, print off your source code. Good old fashioned paper and ink isn't going to be harmed by solar flares. Granted, you won't want to do this backup often, but if things get so bad you ever need to use a paper backup then restoring to a recent point in time will be the least of your worries.
It would take some time to retype all the code but at least it would not be lost.
As for audio and video recordings, they would be lost unless you can find some way to record them on a non-erasable format like a vinyl record. RCA developed a record that could store video but the quality was no better than VHS. With MPEG4 compression that could be upped to HD quality, but you would still lose a lot of high frequency movie content (1080i =/= 2000p of today's movies).
.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Seriously. You are pulling my plonker aren't you?
Do you think *anyone* gives a rat's ass about some indie game (company) with such a natural disaster on our hands? Do you think your biggest worries during and after such an event will be your indie game source code?
Dude. Get a fucking grip!
On reflection. This must be a stupid, immature 20-something asking this question.
These should last longer than civilization:
http://www.techspot.com/news/45006-m-discs-stone-like-optical-discs-that-are-nearly-indestructible.html
An electro magnetic event (man-made or natural) that is sufficiently powerful enough to corrupt magnetically stored data is also more than likely going to be sufficiently powerful to really mess with everything that relies on microprocessors to work.
There has been some proposals around requiring the electric industry to harden their infrastructure and systems to deal with this type of event. Assume the utilities do manage to somehow fund this type of hardening (which would be a massive undertaking in both time and expense). You still need to ask yourself what is going to be left to consume this power. The event is likely to leave many if not most things inoperable on a very wide scale. This means cell phones, computers, televisions, air conditioners, refrigerators, stoves. Any car made after around 1980 is probably also a non-starter. So there's power available, but not much left to consume it. Even if you have protected your data and your data center and have power, what percentage of companies have not?
This would be a hugely disruptive event that would take massive effort and years to recover from for any modern society. Maybe when the dust settles it might be nice to know what you have in your 401(k) and how much back taxes you owe; but then again it's equally possible that all this stuff will be irrelevant in the "new normal."
I agree that this is not an "extinction event" but it could very easily be sufficient to significantly change the political and societal landscape.
Then what is the point in having a back up of your source code then? By the time the world recovered from such a catastrophic event to the global network, your games would be useless. Not that it isn't fun to think about, but you are redundant enough.
And finally, as the last one was in 2000, and they're due every 500 years, you'll be good for a while.
One presumes that these events are totally random processes and like dice, the fact you rolled two 6s last go has no effect on whether you'll roll two 6s this time.
Assuming that to be true, you could just as easily get one next year as in 500 years.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I don't know, but I'm baffled by the priorities that would have you looking to preserve the source code of a small indie game company against near-extinction level events and present that as something motivated by business priorities ("since source code is kind of our lifeblood.")
It seems to me that there are a near-infinite panoply of risks that are vastly more likely to materialize that are much more fruitful to mitigate, such that the marginal benefit of mitigating that particular risk for an indie game company is very small (especially considering that mitigating the risk to your company's source code from a near-extinction level event won't address the fact that such an event would still eliminate your market, your systems of delivering goods to that market, and the financial and social systems -- including property rights regimes -- underpinning that market.)
What are the chances that you still care about data and aren't preoccupied scrapping the skin tumors off you third hand?
With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately...how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?
Two things to consider. First if the Carrington event was a near-extinction event why did the world's population survive intact (with the exception of a few unfortunately telegraph operators)? Second if a vast majority of the earth's population did die (i.e. a real near-extinction event) why would the survivors be interested in your video game data? In addition if the EM disturbance is so great that it erases hard drives everyone's computers will also have fried so even if they were somehow interested in the midst of dealing with an unprecedented global disaster they would not have any capability to use it.
So I'd stick with just coping with ordinary disasters which affect, as an upper level, your local town or city. In fact even something like the Carrington event, while hugely disruptive to power grids and communications is unlikely to be powerful enough to affect computers and, given that we would likely have a day or so notice there would be time to power them down and make a tinfoil hat for them. So important stuff could be protected.
You could store your backups underground. The US government has underground installations that can survive not only a nuclear attack,but also the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from any nuclear explosion. If your backup can survive an EMP, it would survive a solar flare. You wouldn't need to make it nuclear explosion proof--if that happened, you'd be wanting to save something other than your data.
Punch cards. Fire proof and water resistant punch chars. Oh and bug proof.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Between those 2 you have pretty much got yourself covered. Unless you are leaving an archive for humanity's successors, you don't need to take it any further than that.
From OP:
"I run a small indie game company, and since source code is kind of our lifeblood, I'm pretty paranoid about backups.
[snip]
How could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?"
Just pointing out that if there were a true Carrington event, it won't make a whit of difference if your games company's data is recoverable or not. Who are you going to sell to? And what would they play your games on?
15 million lines of code. Call it 100 lines per page to ensure OCR can read it after. Let's be generous and go double-sided. That's 75K pages of printout. At 0.003" per page, that's a stack of paper roughly 6 feet tall.
Any event energetic enough to erase them will also erase all life on the planet.
Assuming that apple does not have a patent on them too, use stone tablets, they worked for thousands of years...
The induced electric currents burn up the reflective layer.
That said, any solar flare strong enough to zap CDs is likely going to cause major issues for people as well.
Just create a new form of life and embed your source code in its DNA. Then build a rocket/ion drive/stasis chamber to deliver your new life form to a neighboring star where it can then land and seed life on another planet. The real bitch is starting all over every time you release a patch.
How feasible would printing everything with very tiny font that is still scannable be?
Simple. Encrypt it, mark the file TOP SECRET and put it on a website. Wikileaks will pick it up and post it worldwide in a matter of days. :-)
In short: Get your ass to Mars!
Clearly the solution is to open-source all of your games and seed the source code.
if the world ends, nobody is going to want your games anyway...
If there were a Carrington event (or worse a "near extinction" event), would anyone care about indie-games?
And if that doesnt work (it should), try uploading your data to the cloud. I am at least 400% certain that is the solution to any and all data storage issues.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Any non-magnetic media that would be stored where temperatures wouldn't cause it to rapidly degrade.
Mind you in the case of such an event you're probably going to have a hard time finding a media reader that is still in functioning order (assuming an EMP or similiar event, both magnetic storage media as well as stored charge media would most likely be lost, meaning that your cdrom drive, bios, and probably a few other things you didn't know about will no longer have any programming in them, thus making it difficult for you to retrieve your data.
On the other hand if you had a punchcard or switch array flashing device you might be able to reprogram those through laborous manual methods, but I imagine few people have the knowledge/competency anymore to actually design such a device, combined with the funding and interest in doing so.
Stop listening to all the Naysayers. A good DR (disaster recovery) plan should include all possibilties.
First off, any CME(coronal mass ejection - the stuff that hits earth and causes the geomagnetic storms we're planning against) powerful enough to wipe optical media will absolutely render every last system capable of rendering your games a smoldering heap of silicon. In all likelihood the precision manufacturing required to recreate said devices will also be permanently decommissioned. I think it's safe to say that your industry is dead.
But cheer up - all of the other industries are dead too!
So now we're back to basics: how can you provide food, shelter, water, clothing, open source?
Food. The food supply is dried up instantly in the Western world. You will have to provide it yourself. But since you lead a company with (judging by the post) more than one person, you can all work together to tackle different aspects of food. For instance, you fundamentally require fats, protein, and carbohydrates for energy. Protein is likely the hardest. Only a few plants (soy, quinoa, for instance) provide a complete protein, so you will need to balance food production to make sure you have it covered (corn and beans will do nicely). Don't forget that your current offices will have to be razed to make room for the field. You need to have demolition materials at hand. Sledgehammers and crowbars are nice. TNT, dynamite, C4, semtex, or other high explosives are better and multipurpose (see: security). Diesel oil and fertilizer would probably be best - demolition, security, fuel, and food for your food will all be covered.
Water. You better not be too far from hydrological resources. Water will be the new oil. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, and all of southern California will be at constant war over the precious fluid. Stockpiling this will be hard. Some of your company should probably learn guerilla warfare tactics and strategy to ensure a continuous supply (see: food -> explosives).
Shelter. Since you must grow all of your food, and otherwise provide for yourself and your employees and (of course) their families. You will need a villa. An unfortunate truth about DR is that most people are not prepared. With government instantly neutralized, these "have-nots" will have to look to the "haves" and take what is "rightfully" theirs. Your villa should perhaps be a compound surrounding your food and water stores. You will, of course, require forces to secure the compound. Guerilla tactics will not work here - defense is a different specialty. Your arms specialists should be familiar with how to equip either, but I would recommend that you divide your company into thirds - food production, compound security, and "acquisition specialists". In football terms, these equate to "special teams", "defense", and "offense", if it helps.
Clothing. You're an indie game developer, I bet everyone there is a hippie! Wear the clothes you have until they fall off, then become a nudist compound. If this doesn't work, you have "acquisition specialists" to take care of this category.
Open Source. This is Slashdot. Post your plans under an OSHW (Open Source HardWare) license. Let the community evaluate your plans and provide feedback. ....tactical security advice redacted...
Considering the M-Disk uses a ceramic type backing instead of aluminum it shouldn't be effected by a solar flare.
http://www.gadgetwiki.com/20110818/millenniata-m-disk-stores-your-files-forever-well-almost/
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
It may be the apocalypse... billions of people have died, lava rivers are replacing normal rivers, and you are one of the few humans left running from our cockroach based overlords... But at least you can pass the time playing Angry Birds. At least until next hydrochloric acid rainstorm.
An event big enough to cause the type of problems you're talking about (especially with multiple off-site backups, including different countries) would cause so many problems that getting your source code for Indie GAMES back will be the __least__ of your problems.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Both optical media and magnetic media are essentially immune to solar flares. Hard drive electronics may be damaged, but the data will still be on the platters.
Magnetic tape is hard to erase; it takes a big magnet within inches of the tape. Degaussing most modern tape cartridges takes a field strength above 1000 gauss. The earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss. It varies during solar flares and other events, but the numbers are all below 1 gauss. MRI scanners are in the 500 gauss range, and at those field strengths, metal objects become projectiles.
Magnetic tape is not affected by even intense gamma radiation. NIST totally settled that issue decades ago by lowering a recorded reel of 3/4" computer tape into the gamma ray pool of their nuclear reactor in Gaithersburg, MD, and leaving it there for 45 minutes. It then read back fine. Heat is a big threat to magnetic tape, though.
Tech #1: Gee, there will be an event that will wipe out almost ALL life on Earth as we know it!.
Tech #2: Zomg! Our accounting data! We have to build a system that will keep track of our expenses in case humanity is almost wiped out!
I mean seriously, apart from an intellectual exercise - what the hell do you care? You probably won't be among the survivors anyway. Life is going to suck after that, medical records or no medical records.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
To a remote server in M31 galaxy somewhere.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"Optical and magnetic media would probably be rendered useless by a large enough solar flare, "
Nonsense. Where did you develop this impression from? Not unless you're talking about a nova or something else that would practically sterilize the Earth's surface, a behavior which isn't characteristic of our Sun.
A "Carrington event" at the ground would be vastly less powerful than an ordinary magnet near your hard drive. It takes more than mild magnetic field variations like that to affect a hard drive or any other type of storage. The Earth's magnetic field is weak, and even during a geomagnetic storm the field effects are still weak compared to everyday magnets. The worst conceivable solar flare would start wiping out living things long before your hard drives and especially optical storage would be problematic. Nothing like that has ever been observed in human history or the last many millions of years. The only issue from serious solar flares would be power outages affecting drives that were spun-up, and that's what backups are for already. Cleanly shut those systems down, and there's simply no issue from any plausible solar flare. I suggest you stop getting your paranoia fix from trashy TV shows and bad sci-fi, and read what the ground effects from big solar flares actually are.
Perhaps you should instead worry about the rare chance your office could be hit by an asteroid. At least that's a rare event that could actually trash your data.
"With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately..."
What talk? The word you are looking for is "hype". Unless you're a member of some kind of doomsday cult, there is no particular reason to expect "near-extinction" events, and if one did occur, trust me, you'd have more important things to worry about than whether your data was backed up.
Basically, your priorities are whacked. Stop wasting time and effort worrying about unlikely events that wouldn't cause a problem for your data even if they happened, or events that are so severe and rare that if they did occur you wouldn't care about your data anyway. Pick something more likely, like flood, fire, lightning strikes, tornado, landslide, earthquake, tsunami, or whatever other natural hazards exist in your area. Even if you tried to prepare for the "once in 100000 year" extremely rare events, it would be the same sort of preparations as you should make for most of those more common ones anyway (water and food). If you really think data should be a priority, you've already got off-site backups. You don't need to do anything else.
My solution to a "Carrington event"? In the ample warning in the hours to days before the flare arrived here, shut down the computer until the power comes back on. Done.
So your data is so important you want to ensure it outlives the hman race. Yet you store it in things that are easily lost or stolen like keyrings and mobile phones? You also put it in locations completely outside your control like the cloud and even in other countries with who-knows-what legal rules?
Let's rethink your data storage habits before we worry about the end of the world.
...If anything like that ever happens, nobody will give a shit about your indie game.
They seem to have a long life span if you bury them right.
http://millenniata.com
"The M-DISC is the first ever permanent file backup disc that lasts forever. Unlike computer hard-drives and optical discs (CD and DVD) that suffer from decay, destroying the files you were trying to preserve and protect, the M-DISC cannot be overwritten, erased, or corrupted by natural processes. Best of all, you can access your data anywhere and anytime. It is the new standard in digital storage.
"
Disclaimer: No investment, no involvement
The problem is that no form of storage is permanent, and with DRM, and encryption, no form of storage is recoverable if the original hardware no longer exists.
Optical media degrades over time, a solar flare isn't going to take it out, but age will. Plus CD-ROM's are extremely delicate. DVD's have smaller pits, but are slightly less delicate due to having coatings on the label side, where as cd-r media does not. In the event of a solar flare that destroys all electronics, we'll never be able to read it before it degrades.
Magnetic media is toast in the event of a solar flare, as it degrades over time. The chips (eg on a hard drive) will be destroyed, and tape-based magnetic media (floppies, VHS) will be unusable without working physical hardware.
Paper degrades over time, but it's safe from a solar flare. It's not weather or humidity proof, so storing books is a problem.
You see the pattern? Storage environment and media readers are the the problem, not the storage medium. In the event of "end of civilization" the only stuff we will have of our civilization will be written in stone or metal that hasn't degraded. This is probably why we only ever find stone ruins of civilizations past. If they ever got more advanced than we are now, they probably made the same mistakes and made their way of storing advanced knowledge impossible to retrieve. In short, the aliens are here, and we are they.
Should time travel ever be achievable, archaeologists of the future will be digging up our garbage dumps and finding lots of damaged/crushed things from our culture. This will warrant them coming back in time and figuring out what these things are. Like in the little mermaid. Maybe nobody in the year 6112 will know what a fork is, because they've surpassed the concept of eating food. Who knows.
Check out high density bar codes and back up to paper. That will be safe from solar flares.
Or, you could get the code tatooed on your body. The git commit process would kinda suck though.
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Who would your customers be after your data successfully survives such an event?
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134427-a-paper-based-backup-solution-not-as-stupid-as-it-sounds
"Is that dad? Either that or Batman's really let himself go."
paper, data won't get wiped but might burn.
if you personally manage to survive the initial days of such an event, I think your data is the least of your concerns. Unless you are writing code that specifically supports the military communications infrastructure in your native country, I seriously doubt that your business is going to be viable, regardless on whether your optical backups in your safe are saved.
Most of your employees will be dead. Those that survive won't be coming to work, they'll have survival foremost on their minds. If you survive and really care that much about your data, good luck getting to work - your car will be fried, public transit will be non-existent. A global event like this would set us, as in mankind, back decades at least. By the time the infrastructure exists again that would make your sourcecode usable, do you really think it would be relevant?
LOL ... Sounds simple after moving our historical records for medicare billing. We just emptied 12 5-drawer file cabinets, after destroying the extra PALLET of old records.
Now you only need a plan for biblical floods :O
How the heck do people this dumb get to be a CEO of anything: http://twitter.com/KactusOTP/
Look, the quantity of backups you have on phones, computers, RAID arrays, at work, at home, thumb drives, etc looks like a case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I am NOT a psychiatrist, but I've been treated for it. I'd suggest that you see a psychologist or psychiatrist and see if you manifest OCD symptoms. If you do, get it treated! If you don't, go on vacation and unwind. Putting your business before yourself is the wrong way to live.
Now I need to read the next story on /.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Switch to RAID 6. Or some wother format with dual parity drives. With the size of drives now-a-days it is pretty likely that another drive will die as you are populating a fresh replacement drive on RAID5.
Just give everybody that purchases your games a copy of the source code along with instructions on how to reach you after a major event. You are obviously not worried about piracy as you already have a multitude of copies of the code floating around. "source code is kind of our lifeblood - Every system has a local copy, servers run from a RAID 5 NAS, we have complete offsite backups, backup to keyrings/mobile phones, and cloud backups in other countries as well"
But..but...but ... they told us Climate Change was going to do all these things.
And no one on slashdot modded those exaggerations down......?
... remember to replace the tapes in the tape drive each morning, and check the integrity each forthnight. Thank you.
- your sysadm
PS: May god have mercy on our backups.
Invest in an array of 230ft satellite dishes and transmit your source-code off-planet at maximum power. Retrieval of the data may be problematic, though.
Considering that a Carrington event would basically be like choosing the "blow the fucker to the dark ages" ending of the original Deus Ex, if you're worried about your source code after one... You need to get your priorities straight.
Either that, or stop hiding from Nurse Ratched. Those pills are good for you.
I run a small indie game company
Whoop-de-doo! You and 500,000 other people on Slashdot.
and since source code is kind of our lifeblood, I'm pretty paranoid about backups.
...so are the other 500,000 indie game developers on Slashdot.
Every system has a local copy, servers run from a RAID 5 NAS, we have complete offsite backups, backup to keyrings/mobile phones, and cloud backups in other countries as well.
Then you're pretty well covered, I'd say. What the hell else do you want?
With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately, I've been wondering: is it actually possible to store or protect data in such a way that if such an event occurred, data survives and is recoverable in a useful form?
Yes.
Optical and magnetic media would probably be rendered useless by a large enough solar flare
So would your customers' computers.At that point your data is useless without a working computer system to run it on. Are you also going to preserve entire computers so that people can play your cute little indie game after they've survived a nuclear holocaust and eaten their family members?
and storing source code/graphics in paper format would be impractical to recover,
Sitting around writing your new indie game when you've got no power and no electronics is beyond impractical.
so Slashdot, short of building a Faraday cage 100 km below the surface of the Moon, how could you protect data to survive a modern day Carrington event?
That's cute, did you just learn what a Carrington event was and now feel the need to come pose a ridiculous question to Slashdot to validate your newly acquired knowledge? I assure you that your cute little indie game project is not that important to the survival of the human race.
Some thoughts:
1) sufficient microwave radiation or other EM radiation received by a CD/DVD WILL fry. Toss one in microwave and watch. And that's with about 500-1000 watts of power.
2) flash drives are based on capacitance, so while on the whole, they are not affected by things like x-rays or bulk erasers, time, static discharge, and cosmic radiation can induce bit flips.
Now, onto the question: protecting data and access to data, in the event of a massive coronal discharge.
1) Determine amount of data you need to protect, and the best format for it.
2) Determine technology, which will then determine size of container.
3) Once size of container is determined, determine best location.
4) Redundancy. Spare parts, in case something fails/dies.
So, let's say your digital assets: source code, compilers, environments, etc. all amount to about say... 5-10TB of data.
1) media redundancy: hard drives, flash drives, and tape.
I suggest a RAIDZ array with 2-3 parity disks. RAIDZ because of the block level checksum'ing and ability to correct data errors.
I would also build multiple servers with the arrays, one for hard drives and one for flash. Both with tape drives.
Data would be sync'd to the flash units for fast download, then sync'd to the spinning drive units. Both would commit to tape.
All drives can be pulled from the system and packed in individual foam padded, air tight, crush resistant, and faraday'd cases.
Both servers would be securely mounted and shock resistant. Additional identical servers with up to date OS/install media would be stored in reinforced containers in the event the "live" systems are damaged beyond repair.
The whole would be setup inside of a modified/reinforced cargo container, which can be moved or stored somewhere. The unit, has 2 sets of doors. Both sets are electrically faraday cages. They allow people to go in and out of the container while maintaining the EM protection.
Both doors are also capable of hermatically sealing the unit.
The unit has rack mounted batteries and UPS system in the event it is disconnected from grid power. Solar panels in storage. As well as dry provisions, water, medicine, etc. Multiple laptops should also be packed in with the system, with various communication gear(radios, celphones, portable cel tower cel, microwave point to point, etc.) for personnel. Basically, these units should also serve as trauma/survival outposts in the event of a serious event.
There would be multiple units in different geographical areas. Given at least 2 units, only one may be actively accessed at any given time. Given more than 2 units, only (N/2) max number of units can be accessed at any one time. This ensures that if the event happens mid-access, only a certain number are lost.
Some units should be placed underground while others still, undersea, so as to avoid catastrophic physical failures
Is this methodology cost effective? No. But given the survival requirements...
Shhh! Don't tell him that stuff. I plan on offering him my patented optical disk Carrington Event protection device. To the untrained eye, it may look like a paper bag, but for the low low price of $999.99 you can own it today.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
You have other problems you need to take care of first.
Paper Tape, or Punch Cards
Geez, get your priorities straight. A Carrington event is only a statistical probability.
How are you going to protect your source code against the eventual heat death of the universe?!?
That's a virtual certainty! *
* (for some cosmological models)
under file, hit print
The summery is poorly ordered, and so you all have missed the point. The point is not to protect the game backup, but rather, the game source code backup is the reason the person is thinking about this issue. A better summery could be:
It depends on what you want to store. Obviously paper and all these metallic discs with tiny engravings are not practical for version control (having to print/engrave even every week would rapidly get tiresome), but these are quite good for reboot info. In fact, The Long Now Foundation Rosetta Disk is the sort of thing you would think would be what would be wanted.
In fact, all these questions have already been answered, and/or are being answered by people like the Long Now Foundation.
---
If in fact I misunderstood (and everyone else didn't) and you want to back up games software so that you can access it again, that's different. Ignoring why (and saying, because it's an interesting bloody thought experiment): what's wrong with getting stuff onto multiple formats, storing the devices to read these formats (along with some electricity generators -- perhaps a bike generator), and instructions on paper -- that's one pack. Stick a pack in a fireproof safe, stick it in a mine-shaft. Stick others in multiple different places around the place. (Uluru is pretty good -- geographically stable, big landmark, hardly any people, etc.)
OK, actually the question is not so interesting. But I still would have been more interested in people actually thinking about (mental masturbation or not) that them harping on about "more important things to worry about". It's like: yeah, I'm so prepared, it will take a nuke going of over my home to kill all my backups. And then I'll have more important things to worry about. Yeah. What if you are overseas when the nuke goes off? You'll be alive, and while you have more important things to worry about, having access to letters and documents etc. is still very important for your mental well being. And in the event that the nuke was a one off (i.e. a global war doesn't eventuate) you'll still want to carry on with your life. So fucking well prepare for more than just a nuke going off! Prepare for a anything.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
> "With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately"
Buddy, if a 20 mile diameter rock hits the Earth, whether your source code for Angry Turkeys survives is the least of your problems.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/16/13314843-lone-house-surrounded-by-scorched-earth-survives-wildfire?lite
What medium are your offsite backups stored on? And where? In addition to a colo data center on our campus, my organization contracts with Iron Mountain for full offsite backups, which we dump to tape and send to their facility. Depending on your location in the US (or anywhere in the world really), many of their storage facilities are converted missile silos and bunkers - climate-controlled, and far enough underground to potentially survive nuclear and Carrington events alike. There are many other companies that provide the same services too. Depending on how much you store and how frequently you need to send it/retrieve it, the price of service can vary, but if you're that paranoid, it's worth a look.
Then again, if you're storing on an optical medium, none of this will matter except for the climate-control - optical media can't be degaussed.
Because once you protect yourself from solar flares, then you'll still have to worry about Ancient Aliens, Mayan doomsday calendars, Bible codes, The Freemasons and Rosicrucians, and no doubt Nostradamus had something to say about you losing your data, but we'll have to wait until after it happens.
Your middle name isn't Hister is it?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Is this the same dumbass who wanted to make a personal NAS out of old tape drives?
At one point, if all your hard drives and backups are destroyed, then everyone's would be also. Who the hell will want your game software, if they can't even get an OS up an running.
I pretty sure your games will be the least of everyone's concerns.
silly rays can't affect cardboard.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You probably half, what, a couple million lines of source? print it out and store it in a waterproof/fireproof safe(s). It wouldn't be fun but you could hire a team of people at like $10/hour to key it all back in the matter of a few weeks, tops.
In all seriousness, dude, if an event of that scale occurs, what are you going to recover it to? If the backups in other countries are dead, there's no computers left. At that point, the only useful backsup are printed on paper, and that only because you can use the paper to light a fire to cook dinner over, after you kill it with a sharp stick.
Get over yourself.
This is the best troll ever!
He doesn't want to protect his 'code', he wants to ensure the survival of his 'art photos'. :-)
First, calculate how much money a loss of source code would set you back (e.g. if it means bankruptcy then that's your retained earnings). Next, multiple that number by the combined probability of all catastrophes that would wipe out your data but not kill you or your ability/desire to conduct business. The product is the number of dollars you should spend worrying about it.
Honestly, that number is probably almost zero. If there's a massive loss of data for everybody then our economy is going to collapse and most companies will cease to exist (perhaps many governments as well). We'd probably also lose all the infrastructure necessary to develop and sell games. The government and large companies in vital industries should absolutely care about this, but small companies probably shouldn't.
Just to clarify, the Carrington event was not an extinction event. Yes, it fucked up electrical grid type thingies (devices connected to large antennas of copper strung between stations separated by many miles), but it did not have sufficient energy to vaporize, ionize, or otherwise cook things at the microscopic level of the pits on optical media. Had it actually done so, thee, me, the birdees and the beeses would no longer be here.
Empirical evidence (the more or less continual presence of life on Earth for the past 6,500 to 3.75 billion years) would seem to indicate that our star doesn't misbehave in this fashion, so step back, breathe, and for God's sake cut back on the hyperbole. :)
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
There is something wrong upstairs when you make the conscious choice to store important data you want to survive on a RAID 5 array.
Optical media is better. If the circuit board on a hard drive fries, you're fucked, because as far as any consumer end-user is concerned, the circuit board is married to the hard drive and the data on it. Go ahead... look up the serial number of the drive in your computer now, and TRY to find someone who can supply the identical circuit board with identical firmware. You can't even do it NOW without hiring professional data-recovery, and I can guarantee that obtaining it a post-event would be much, much worse. In contrast, if your optical drive fries, your disc will still work in another, because the disc ISN'T married to the circuit board, firmware, and all the nasty embedded DRM & drive-level encryption that's implemented via that circuit board.
If you have data you want to archive for more than a month, there's really no choice besides optical media, with multiple copies stored in different locations. Hard drives develop stiction if they aren't powered up for a long time, and there's a whole bunch of other components that can die that are basically married to your platters. In contrast, optical media only has to survive on its own, and find a compatible drive to play it back someday.
For the record, phase-change non-organic (ie, NON-LTH) BD-R discs are probably the best overall media for archival storage available today. The new (cheaper) "LTH" BD-R media is no better than DVD-R for longevity, and I'll go on a limb and say that even the worst & cheapest "original-type" BD-R media is likely to be more robust, durable, and likely to be readable 25 years from now than *any* "archival" organic-dye based DVD or CD media. There's also a company that makes writable DVD media that's basically non-LTH BD-R media burned to DVD standards (Millenniata). Only certain drives support it, and only with special discs... but I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of cash that you could probably burn DVD data discs onto *any* BD-R (non-LTH) disc if you replaced the writer's firmware with your own. You probably couldn't create discs that would play as DVD video in consumer DVD players for various reasons having mostly to do with DRM, but I'd be shocked if it were literally impossible to take control of the stepper motor and laser at the firmware level & burn something a DVD-ROM drive would recognize as "mostly readable" DVD media using BD-R media.
You're a game company. That stuff is an amusement -- it doesn't matter.
a flare that big would wipe out power on a massive scale even if you got your code back no one would be buying it for a long time
The problem here is people are thinking of it as magic and not the physical mechanism. Since a lot of the evidence of plate tectonics was from magnetic properties of igneous rocks, and comparing that to the current magnetic feild at those locations, I really think that indicates we should be skeptical of suggestions that everything magnetic on earth is going to reoriented due to an event that has happened many times over geological timeframe.
As for powerlines acting as antennas and picking up a lot of charge, well that's a very different thing to worrying about drive platters, tapes or individual offline items of electonics. There really isn't a lot of material to act as an antenna in a hard drive so it's an NMR intensity magnetic feild before you could dream of it having trouble from anything other than a surge coming from anywhere else.
Aren't there data vaults in Salt mines and that Seed Ark inside a mountain in the Alps?
In all seriousness though, probably a good lock box with a steel shell would be fine, or a grounded PC with a metal shell with an Earth connection switched off.
Phone companies with T-1 lines recover from lightening strikes all the time.
A Carrington event is not an EMP pulse.. though it would be interesting to try and harness the energy across a power grid to generated an EMP pulse.
That might make a good TV series.
There is a new JJ Abrams show coming up this Fall called Revolution, perhaps the bad guys use a Carrington Event to fuel a massive power grid and EMP blackout North America?
Of course you'll also need to archive a decoder.
Yes, but if they are earthenware they need to be glazed first.
If we have such an event, your not going to be using your computers for a LONG TIME.
Unless you can manufacture your own semiconductor parts with your own electrical grid.
So I wouldn't get that extreme and worry about it.
Even if your laptop or electronics survive, you won't be able to use your computer for anything except localhost.
Communications and gigantic portions of the internet will be destroyed for years, possibly decades.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Has the thought ever occurred to you that they write more source code in addition to games? That they have data worth preserving in those sorts of events?
Neutrinos! No steel box will stop them! Enough of those bastards get through the box and interact with the disc, my data will be history!
Lucky I've got my tinfoil hat on, or they'd have fried my brain ages ago.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
If you are serious about data security, go with RAID1. In RAID5, if more than 1 disk breaks, all of your data is lost, even if other disks are intact. In RAID1, any disk which remains will still contain salvageable data. Correctly setup RAID1 array is safer than RAID5... At least statistically...
Printer + Paper?
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
The magnetic storm set off huge currents in the ground, which invaded the long telegraph lines. Telegraph operators were nearly electrocuted dead by the long, violent sparks erupting from the handsets. And several telegraph stations burnt down.
If the Carrington Event happened today, nearly 10 per cent of the 1000-or-so working satellites in orbit would stop working. That's an immediate $100 billion cost right there.
Banks rely on the super-accurate time signals from the GPS satellites, so then you couldn't get your money.
Now the electrical grids around the world are mostly old, fragile and overloaded. In the USA alone, minor solar storms already cause breakdowns to the grid that increase the cost of electricity by $500 million every 18 months.
But a Carrington Event, when the Sun had a major hissy fit, would kill the entire electrical grid of North America.
And computers and similar sensitive electronic equipment all over the planet would die from electrical spikes inside their delicate low-voltage circuits.
I read this and immediately quit my job, withdrew my life savings, bought a small plot of land in a secret remote location with no civilisation (it's that bit of green on the map right next to Ninety Mile Beach up north in New Zealand), and am moving there on Saturday.
Agree with the parent poster. If something like this happens, and it's really this kind of an epic disaster as painted by the article, you won't have to worry about your source code because the few people who might escape with computers unscathed won't have electricity to run them. If something like this happens, on the scale described in the article, your source code will probably be the last thing on your mind. You'll be concentrating on how to get as much fun as possible before society degrades to an untenable point.
Goodness knows how realistic this picture is; but I'm not going to be worrying about my job if it truly does get to this point.
Magnetic tape is hard to erase; it takes a big magnet within inches of the tape. Degaussing most modern tape cartridges takes a field strength above 1000 gauss. The earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss. It varies during solar flares and other events, but the numbers are all below 1 gauss. MRI scanners are in the 500 gauss range, and at those field strengths, metal objects become projectiles.
MRI scanners are generally well above 10,000 gauss (one tesla). So are Buckyballs and speaker magnets.
MRI magnets turn metal objects into projectiles because their magnets are large, and therefore their fields reach a long way. A magnet's "pull" falls off very sharply at distances much larger than the distance between the magnet's poles. That's why degaussers need to be physically close to the tape.
Remember, most hard drives contain extremely powerful magnets within their housing to drive the head-positioning coils. But the field falls off so fast that it doesn't erase the platters spinning just millimeters away.
It's amazing the questions people come up with. I love the comments.
Modern technology has helped some people think there is no way to live without the technology. And the only solution to prevent the interruption of technology is more technology. I'm glad so many people saw through this and offered the real advice this guy needs.
One does not simply post an intelligent reply to a troll thread.
>a modern day Carrington event?
Well, the first thing that would be on my mind after a modern day Carrington event is to get your fart app up and running again.
I'll take good ol fashioned stone tablets any day. THOSE have withstood the test of time.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
TrueCrypt + Dropbox