Like I’d imagine there’s gonna be a lot of rain over time if I want this time capsule to last like idk 10 years? 30 years?
Is there like a box so tough its indestructible?
Can animals dig it up if I bury it?
How deep do it bury it?
Is the earth’s magnetism gonna affect the hard drive? (Or is there a better medium?)
Like I want this to be like very low budget, I don’t have millions to build an actual timecapsule like some organizations have done. Is there some cheap box that’s waterproof to protect a hard drive from damage for like 30 years buried in the ground?
Hard drives aren’t rated for 30 years, though. Even in optimal conditions, they’d deteriorate.
You must have an amazing porn collection. You can store it on my NAS
If this is a real problem you have, and not just a thought experiment, I think rather than burying the data on some unreliable medium, your best bet is to just pay someone to store it for you offshore, away from the dictatorship you mentioned.
There are plenty of consumer-grade cloud storage services. I’m sure there are more niche ones specifically for long-term archival as well, which would usually be cheaper per bit, per-year, if you don’t need to access the data regularly.
Would you have to worry about the records of your ongoing business with these data storage providers though?
Yes that’s true. There may also be issues just with getting money out of the country to make the required payments to the storage providers. Either due to local restrictions or international sanctions.
For a somewhat recent real-world example of hiding things in this kind of situation, maybe look at how ‘paramilitary’ people in Northern Ireland hid things by putting them in walls and then decorating the wall.
Maybe some “outlet” in your house is actually the connector to the NAS sealed into a void space?
I’m going to buck the trend here and suggest a really physical storage medium: Print your data out. Or laser engrave it onto sheets of metal or polymer, or whatever you want to do. If you just print pokey old black and white ones and zeros as square pixels on a sheet of 8.5x11" paper at a humble 72 DPI you can store a shade under 47 kilobytes per page without having to resort to any additional trickery. Maybe a kB or two less if you need to leave margins. How much data are you really trying to store?
In a sealed container in the dark you could easily make paper last hundreds of years (we have perfectly intact books sitting on ordinary shelves from the 1800s already), and if you wanted to print on Tyvek or something it’d probably endure thousands.
Reading this back would not be a plug-and-play solution but would have the added advantage of being a purely optical process rather than having to interface with antique storage device electronics on whatever computer you may be using 30 years from now. All you’d need is sheet feed scanner or in a pinch any sufficiently high resolution camera, and the ability to run some kind of programming environment to run a script to read those pixels back into file data.
Maybe this wouldn’t be great for archiving your collection of 4k ultra-definition porn, but it’d be absolutely sufficient for storing text and executable data for small programs, plans and schematics, other knowledgy sciency data, and even images… with the added benefit of, if any gestapo thug happens to find this early and dig it up he won’t be able to ascertain what that image is just by looking at the piece of paper.
If you actually want to use paper… QR codes. The format is simple, broadly distributed, and has error correction built in. It’ll make the whole process a lot easier than trying to roll something yourself.
Another poster here suggested the High Capacity Color Barcode as well, which ought to already have some implementations available somewhere and sports an even higher data density if you’re willing (or able) to deal with color.
QR codes are limited to being square in aspect ratio (other than the not terribly helpful “micro rectangular QR” format) and have a maximum payload of ~3kB each. This may not be a great fit for plain consumer paper with a rectangular aspect, and you’d need to jigger some manner of batch reader so’s you don’t drive yourself insane recovering the data. Neither is an insurmountable problem; I’m just thinking out loud, here.
I’d be wary of one or more colors fading over time unless you are VERY careful with how you print these. Being monochromatic, QR codes don’t have such issues. It would likely also be easier to recover a faded QR code than a colored bar code.
I once heard that some printers print (almost) invisible yellow dots on pages, containing data which helps authority track down whoever printed the page. That might be a risk if the data is really sensitive.
This is true.
I’d go with optical media here. Probably multiple capsules.
- M-Disk (DVD if it will fit, otherwise Blu-ray)
- Make an encrypted archive of your data. Strong password - I suggest diceware with 8 or more words so you might remember it in 30 years
- Use DVDisaster to add parity data. You sacrifice some space, but you get error tolerance in exchange
- Wrap the disks up in good jewel cases, well sealed plastic, along with some good big silica gel desiccant packs.
- Put all that in the smallest durable, airtight container you can
- stash somewhere it probably won’t be disturbed for a few decades. Memorize.
- destroy all evidence you did this.
This is terrible advice.Most writable DVDs degrade quickly, even if they’re stored away from sunlight and heat. Every single one of my burned DVDs from more than a few years back is completely unreadable.Update: I missed the very important line about M-DISC. This is critical. I can’t vouch for M-DISC personally, but most other optical media is garbage for archival purposes.
Do you remember what kind they were? For awhile they made them with organic dyes and those died quickly. I believe they stopped producing those, and the inorganic ones are supposed to be much better.
Yes, they were organic dyes. At the time, those were the only kind. Maybe it’s gotten better over the years.
Sorry if this is obvious to everyone, but how would having a hidden hard disk help with living in a dictatorship?
Couldn’t you just let someone in another country take care of archiving it?
It’s 8tb of porn and the government will be banning it, and they’re hoping it’ll pass with time like prohibition did?..
If it were me, I’d be skimming a little to sell on the side to take advantage of those black market prices.
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You could look at fire safe boxes for document storage. Those are usually pretty solid. You would want to bag up the drive inside an anti static bag and probably put a couple of those little water absorbing silicone packets in there as well. If access isn’t an issue then maybe some sealant around the seams to keep it more water tight.
Magnetic tape would be better for long term storage as well I think. Those have longer storage stability. I don’t know how long an unplugged hard drive will reliably store information.
Animals could dig it up but probably wouldn’t as it wouldn’t smell like food. Depth wise I’d go for at least a couple feet deep, the traditional 6 is a surprisingly deep hole and temperature gets more consistent the deeper you go (at least with readily available tools, it eventually starts to get hot again).
Please note totally random opinion with very little experience with long term data storage. Thanks for the fun thought experiment, I hope things get better and you don’t need your backup data.
They key is to diversify. Use different types of storage media, and duplicate your efforts and bury then duplicates somewhere else.
If you can choose only 1 I would choose tape archives.Vacuum seal all your media, whatever they may be. Throw in some of those dehumidifier packets. Moisture will be your biggest enemy.If possible, also add the means to be able to read your media after a long time. Add a couple of raspberry pi computers, vacuum sealed and dehumidified-by-packets again, and usb readers or HATs for the media you chose (though I doubt you will find a cheap tape drive with USB connection, the only option I found was £9000).
Over the years, as new technology gets developed, in particularly interface connectors that will replace USB, I would add converters if possible or just keep them around. Nothing suspicious about having some USB/sata/sas to <new technology> converter in your house.
Or, you know, you could always go with m-disc. Burners are cheap (40€ to 160€) and discs are cheap (4x 100GB costs 100€). For potentially 140€ you could store 400GB on a solid solution. Would still add a reader and devices as described above.
If it’s small you might try printing the files on archival paper with archival ink. Then you can put copies in multiple safe deposit boxes. Also you could bury copies rolled up in plastic water bottles. I think those are unlikely to degrade anytime soon. Or glass bottles with plastic lids.
Most of those ideas are not feasible with a very low budget you want because eventually rot will get to the hard drive and thus making the contents unreadable. So – depending on what you want to preserve – it’s either writable media or printed out in acid-free paper or in microdot negative film, and of those methods, only print media – written, typed, from a copier, or with a laser printer – might as well be cheap.
so, I would suggest talking with an archivist. Many libraries will have archivists on the payroll (Or know one, anyways) and they’d likely be happy to talk about archival methods.
personally, what I would do- and I make no guarantees that it will work for a decade- is to seal the hard drive (or whatever media,) inside a vacuum bag with a shitload of silica desiccant gel. maybe double bag it with even more silica gel, then place it inside a pelican case. if you double bag, splurge on the indicator stuff and let it sit for a week.
but I’m not an archivist, and they may laugh at my suggestion.
Any thoughts on tape? Lto tape is designed for 10+ years
Yeah in a controlled environment. Doubt it can last the promised lifespan when it’s buried in the ground
As someone who has lost hard drive in the past, encrypt and back up to the cloud.
It is the safest way.
Does it need to be physical? I’d expect data on a well funded S3 account or a tar snap account to live 30 years
I wouldn’t trust cloud storage in case of a dictatorship.
Interesting thread.Would be interested to learn from commenters which storage media is most impervious to digital rot.
The standard (and tested for decades) answer is tape.
M-Disc might also be an alternative.
Tape needs to be stored in a controlled environment. Heat and humidity can degrade tapes. Usually you’d transfer the data to a new tape every 5 to 10 years just to be safe.
tnx for the reply, I suspected as much.
