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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?
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.
Do the math on the volume a gigabyte of data on paper take would consume. Now go look at the size of the source repository even for a crappy little Android game. Not practical.
Democrat delenda est
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!
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.
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
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"
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
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.
Punch cards. Fire proof and water resistant punch chars. Oh and bug proof.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
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.
In short: Get your ass to Mars!
If there were a Carrington event (or worse a "near extinction" event), would anyone care about indie-games?
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.
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.
To a remote server in M31 galaxy somewhere.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
...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.
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."
Scannable with what? It would have to be big enough to be human-readable with optical magnification. At least for the schematics and code of your scanner.
Beyond that, you have to print THIS small: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/08/12/2145205/color-printing-reaches-its-ultimate-resolution
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
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"
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.
How you store it has a lot to do with how much paper you consume. Modern scanners can discern a lot smaller 'dots' than ye-olde paper tape reels, particularly if read-speed isn't a major concern. Given sufficiently small dots / colors you could store quite a bit of data on your average 8.5x11 sheet.
...however in this case I'm going to go with backup tapes in a Faraday cage, also known as a 'bank vault'.
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.
Because anyone can start a company and declare themselves the CEO.
Most source code isn't measured in anything approaching gigabytes. The entire linux kernel (which is orders of magnitude bigger than any Android game source I've seen) is an 80MB archive.
Harvard Mk 1 paper tape was about 2.5" wide and carried 30 bytes per inch. That's about 2 2/3 feet per kb of data.
I've got an Android tic tac toe app that's 62k of source code. That'd be 165' of paper tape. On regular paper, that'd fan-fold to be 1' long and about 0.7" high (at 2.5" wide). Heavier card stock might quadruple that height or something like that.
The original Doom source code--with all the art and everything--is under 400k, which'd be 1000' of paper tape or a 4" high stack at 1' long and 2.5" high. It's outdated by desktop standards but in the realm of many Android games I've seen.
The Doom 3 source code with art is 9.5MB, which would be a 9' high stack.
The whole linux kernel (80MB) would be about 40 miles of tape; on regular paper that's a 35.5' high stack at 1' long and 2.5" wide. Which is cumbersome for sure, and would take almost a full day to read in at typical paper-tape scanning speeds.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
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.
Em, the size of a tarball doesn't tell the story. Look at the size of a source repository. As in a CVS, git or SourceSafe storage area. Those suckers get huge and they get huge fast.
And I think you are mistaken on the size of some of those items. Doom came on three(?) floppy discs. Or are you expecting me to believe the geniuses who created Doom would distribute it in a format larger than the one used to fully express the editable data for the artwork and levels? And Doom3's art assets are certainly larger than 9.5MB.
Democrat delenda est
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And I think you are mistaken on the size of some of those items. Doom came on three(?) floppy discs. Or are you expecting me to believe the geniuses who created Doom would distribute it in a format larger than the one used to fully express the editable data for the artwork and levels?
It's not uncommon for executables to be bigger than source code. And Doom distributed the runtimes that come with the compiler in the binary distro.
And Doom3's art assets are certainly larger than 9.5MB.
You're right, the images directory turns out to be an empty skeleton. My bad there. I still think the main point (that 1GB is orders of magnitude bigger than most Android games) is valid, though.
rage, rage against the dying of the light