Slashdot Mirror
'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this year, with the first customers -- the governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Norway -- depositing copies of various historical documents in the vault.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.
See http://m.slashdot.org/story/324477
What the hell is wrong with you? Cant you read your own site?
I missed those quaint microfiche readers.
As long as clear instructions are provided for reading them, it should be ok. It's not clear those requirements have been met, but still better than a poke in the eye.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
I also wonder if they've stored instructions on how to read the QR codes down there.
D'ya think?
I trust the Norwegians to pickle our date. They've been pickling herrings for centuries with great success.
No sig today...
It's almost as if you don't actually know what the word "proprietary" means.
No sig today...
I won't matter. Nobody's going to have the technology to sail to Svalbard and drill through hundreds of feet of permafrost after the zombie apocalypse.
No sig today...
That's patent archive not parent archive. Though the latter would be funny.
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.
If al of the world's ice were to melt, we would get 70m of additional ocean depth.
After all, how will the aliens find it?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What percentage will be porn?
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.'"
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?
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??
Depends on if they created some long lasting items that tell them where to look for said vault that were widely distributed to people all over.
Time to offend someone
Ah, a Luddite!
"Moogs! Would YOU buy that for a quarter?" CMK
Do these people realize that they have made themselves a target for everybody (major power and terrorist) with a nuke?
Once I read "... its proprietary film format.." I stopped reading.
-
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...
'Arctic World Archive' Will Keep the World's Data Safe In an Arctic Minecraft
My brain became blocky for a sec.