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'Arctic World Archive' Will Keep the World's Data Safe In an Arctic Mineshaft (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Norway's famous doomsday seed vault is getting a new neighbor. It's called the Arctic World Archive, and it aims to do for data what the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has done for crop samples -- provide a remote, impregnable home in the Arctic permafrost, safe from threats like natural disaster and global conflicts. But while the Global Seed Vault is (partially) funded by charities who want to preserve global crop diversity, the World Archive is a for-profit business, created by Norwegian tech company Piql and Norway's state mining company SNSK. The Archive was opened on March 27th this year, with the first customers -- the governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Norway -- depositing copies of various historical documents in the vault. Data is stored in the World Archive on optical film specially developed for the task by Piql. (And, yes, the company name is a pun on the word pickle, as in preserving-in-vinegar.) The company started life in 2002 making video formats that bridged analog film and digital media, but as the world went fully digital it adapted its technology for the task of long-term storage. As Piql founder Rune Bjerkestrand tells The Verge: "Film is an optical medium, so what we do is, we take files of any kind of data -- documents, PDFs, JPGs, TIFFs -- and we convert that into big, high-density QR codes. Our QR codes are massive, and very high resolution; we use greyscale to get more data into every code. And in this way we convert a visual storage medium, film, into a digital one." Once data is imprinted on film, the reels are stored in a converted mineshaft in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The mineshaft (different to the one used by the Global Seed Vault) was originally operated by SNSK for the mining of coal, but was abandoned in 1995. The vault is 300 meters below the ground and impervious to both nuclear attacks and EMPs. Piql claims its proprietary film format will store data safely for at least 500 years, and maybe as long as 1,000 years, with the assistance of the mine's climate.
I wonder how long the hardware to read those QR codes lasts down there. I also wonder if they've stored instructions on how to read the QR codes down there, in something other than a QR code.
See http://m.slashdot.org/story/324477
What the hell is wrong with you? Cant you read your own site?
the arctic melts in conservative ecomentalist estimations in the next 5 years and the vault falls into the bottom of the vast, 200+ meters above current sea level, resulting ocean.
Not that it matters, we'd all be dying of heat from lack of ozoneon our canoes, hills or mountain tops.
I missed those quaint microfiche readers.
I always bang on about this. But Southampton University's Quartz Crystal storage claims "360 terabytes of information on nanostructured quartz for up to 14 billion years".
This would seem best to developed for this type of application.
" proprietary film format "
Stopped reading there.
It gives new meaning to
So the in-crowd knows who the out-crowd is. Must keep permanent records of sex offenders, men who stood-up their dates, men who acted with implied disrespect for women. Basically just keep a list of men and make sure every man is shunned until the end of time.
This man made globul warming religion decided to store their doom proving data in the 1 pole where ice is melting?
Antarctica is now millions of square kilometers too big, disproving the whole intolerant left ideology named man made global warming.
This seems like one of the biggest wastes of money. Where is the benefit in storing stuff where ice is melting??
What's wrong with slashdot these days???
This story ran about a week ago!! Has slashdot developed a stutter or is it smokin too
Many cones and forgot he already told us this story???
The summary says it will be stored *in* the permafrost. I can think of quite a few global disasters that would make this very vulnerable. Surely the mineshaft goes into the bedrock below the permafrost.
like climate change?
How to read digital media. The parent archive. Things like the ascii code. Wikipedia in full and in all languages. Episodes of Sesame Street or some sort of way that at least one human language can be deciphered (and presumably dictionaries in various languages to English or Norwegian).
Are they doing that?
Do you expect us to believe, that humanity will remember that particular vault after a global catastrophe and demise of lots and lots of people?
Go and ask people on the street, do they know about that vault (meybe they know)... and do they know exactly where it is, and how to get there?
There will be "campfire stories" and "childrens stories" about "bearded wise man (god) who dug a hole to keep safe the knowledge from angry dragon-devil etc."
"A for-profit business, created by Norwegian tech company Piql and Norway's state mining company SNSK": keeping "World's Data Safe" sounds like a great excuse to dig up the arctic for mining exploration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_of_the_Arctic
A descendent of the Boston Dynamics robot will find it. Probably will feel sorry for us until it sees the video of their ancestor robot getting pushed.
Actually, Joe Biden only boned interns who could spell scour. And who came by train.
After all, how will the aliens find it?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What percentage will be porn?
Hopefully they store a couple copies of the reader, and in 500 years, should we need it, support for "Legacy"
is still considered viable within the 'cultures' and 'architecture' Our overlords have become.
Which reel Goatse is on?
They are suspending all activity, since one of the project managers reminded them of the user requirement that specifically stated that the media be stored in an abandoned mine shaft.
"That [one word] changes everything" he said. But he was not referring to delays in the schedule
The first customer should be Ariel Winter's twitter feed. I have no idea who she is, or why she seems to be constantly tweeting stuff, but Twitter.com keep telling me to go check her out.
Guess what happens when climate changes? Permafrost is not so permanent. We don't know yet whether our unprecedented-for-literally-ages CO2 release is going to perturb the ice age cycle.
Find the least steep and most stable mountain you can, drill a big hole in it, and put it there. And then do that ten more times.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why use film? Laser-perforated thin sheets of aluminum (rolled up for convenience) hold lots of data and last next to forever in a wider range of more hostile conditions...
so in 10,000 years, will the beings who find these vaults(if they aren't buried at the bottom of the sea, or under a thick layer of ice) be able to understand what they were for?
They hit some kind of large stupid metal ring with symbols around it. Melting it down did help pay for the drilling operation though.
Will there be any survivors? If there are, will they regret the fact that they did survive?? ..Getting back to storage. Since the polar ice caps are melting due to fossil fuels, wouldn't it make sense to store it in more than one place? ...If you were not among the ones that did survive, would you give a poop that they did??
Do these people realize that they have made themselves a target for everybody (major power and terrorist) with a nuke?
Why not pay them for their vault?
At least put it a good ways AWAY from the seed vault. Hundreds or hundreds of miles. Why? We don't want the seed vault to be collateral damage when someone decides to erase the internet by nuking the site, or breaking into it...
The seed vault at least, probably by existing is not motivating people to attack it. Backing up all the data in the world by contrast... also, wouldn't deep inside the moon be a better place to put that, if you want to make sure it survives? Just saying.
If one reel catches fire, all history could go up in smoke pretty fast. Maybe that's a 'feature' - a delete key when one wants to erase the past. The Captcha for this comment came up as 'e r a s e d'
Once I read "... its proprietary film format.." I stopped reading.
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mmmrrrggglll!!......
I tend to rant.
The idea of using photographic film for archival storage of digital data is not really new. In the late 1960s, IBM developed the IBM 1360 "Photostore" system to archive vast amounts of data. The 1360 was developed for the two Lawrence Radiation Laboratory campuses (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). The system wrote the data to silver halide film which was automatically processed and could be retrieved (after a few minutes to develop the film) in just a minute or two, depending on the retrieval queue length.
Only five systems were delivered as very few places had the need to store such vast amounts of data. The system could store 1 terabit (not terabyte) or 170 gigabytes of data (bytes on supercomputers of that era were 6 bits) "on-line" as well as unlimited off-line. IIRC, retrieval times for off-line data typically ran an hour or two.
I believe the Wikipedia article is wrong on some counts. The film was not on aperture cards, but was film strips about 3" x 1" which were stored in plastic cases that held a number of strips. You can see these at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, USA.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
While I am kind of curious how digital files of any complexity can be converted into a QR Code, even a really big one, I am also kinda curious if anyone will know WTF a QR Code is in 10 or 20 years.
I guess it must be some sort of Microfiche hybrid. In looking at options for large scale digital document storage and archives it became clear that old microfiche has held up pretty well over the test of time and is still the defacto standard in many cases.
I say we go with Mentats and Microfiches...
Like dead sea scrolls.
'Arctic World Archive' Will Keep the World's Data Safe In an Arctic Minecraft
My brain became blocky for a sec.