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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?"
It's a bummer your post was modded down. You bring up a good point, it's really hard to get past this guy's warped sense of priorities.
I propose a do-over. How about instead of asking how to protect his video game in the event of global catastrophe, how about just a discussion of how we (as a society I mean) bank a few things so that if that event does come it doesn't turn out as bad as what happened in Dark Angel? For example, what if the US Gov't built a vault somewhere that could supposedly survive this even and stored a few computers with tons of data about history, technology, maybe a backup of Wikipedia, etc?
Well my idea may be dumb but I have to say a discussion about that would be way more interesting to me.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This is bullshit. You don't need to ground the Faraday cage. It doesn't matter what is the potential between the cage and the ground/earth. It's a self-contained system, the inside is shielded from the outside. Lightning protection and grounding is only relevant when the system has connections to the outside. If all you want is an isolated Faraday cage, you don't need anything special. Make it from thick enough steel such that it will decently carry lightning currents with "acceptable" resistive voltage drop along the internal surface, and that's about it. For all I care it can be two layers with an insulator between them, so that even large I*R voltage drops on the outside won't propagate to the inner layer (other than by electromagnetic induction -- in that case increase suitably the insulating gap).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
OTOH, have you considered punch cards? They are essentially impervious to electrical and magnetic pulses.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Our typical power distribution infrastructure is designed to cope with 50/60Hz loads. Any overload at 0.1Hz or less will likely destroy it. At such frequencies the transformers turn into resistors (core saturation), the breakers turn into slightly dissipative shunts, and a lot of fires and explosions ensue. If you want to blow up a power distribution transformer, temporarily connect a DC current source providing 3-5x rated winding RMS current to the middle phase. The compliance of the current source probably needs to be "only" up to 4-8x the RMS voltage rating, that should be enough to keep the breakers arcing over. In a minute or so the transformer is gone (or going and self sustaining), and you can connect to the next one to keep at it.
It would only be bad for the power distribution infrastructure because said infrastructure isn't designed to deal with "almost DC" induced voltages. All the breakers likely won't interrupt large DC currents at all -- there will be a sustained arc that won't extinguish that will keep the current flowing. The transformers will get destroyed when their cores saturate and due to DC currents flowing through the phase conductors. Upon saturation, the transformer is no more inductive, it becomes a resistor that converts all the incoming energy to heat. Realistically, that means an oil explosion in short order in oil cooled types. Air cooled ones will catch fire when the insulation is hot enough to combust (the copper will heat it up, so it's not like there'd be much in the way of heatsinking going on).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The "extinction level event" will be a 1. Government gone mad (see Germany 1936) 2. A total world banking breakdown (see 1929) 3 A man made environmental collapse (see A Path Where No Man Thought by Cal Sagan/Richard Turco & other similar books).
You need
A remote hiding place
A deep water well
Firewood/seeds
Cached supplies (scattered/buried/hidden)
Gas Masks
Solar Cell/Power
Guns/Ammo
Data? Screw data! Food, Water, Protection, heat! AND A VERY LOW PROFILE!!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Two word solution: Wood Chipper
Not a good solution. Most flash chips are 48TSOP packages (12mmx18.4mm). Most wood chippers have 1" (25.4mm) spacing between blades. Chances are very high that your flash chip will pass straight through without damage and only the packaging will be mangled.