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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
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.
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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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?
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).
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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
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.
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.
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.
And at 13 punch cards per kilobyte, how many trees would have to be cut down to save Rebecca Black's "Friday?"
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.
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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
Mars has no atmosphere/magnetosphere, so I think that even if it is farther away from the Sun it would be hit way harder than Earth's surface.
Why can't
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.
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
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.