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Ask Slashdot: Protecting Data From a Carrington Event?

Posted by timothy on from the managed-to-save-the-kids-and-the-games dept.

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?"

2 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Dumbass... by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

  2. Re:Don't panic! by Paracelcus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!!

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    I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd