Archive for July 1st, 2008

Long Term Data Storage (>1,000 Years)

Wolfgang Gruener over at TGDaily.Com had an interesting article a few months ago about researchers putting together a solution to preserve data for >1,000 years. Researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz call their networked-based system Pergamum,

Pergamum, named after the ancient Greek library that made the transition from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment, is designed as a distributed network of individually fully functional network storage devices. Compared to current MAIDs (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks), NAND flash memory (described as on-volatile random access memory - NVRAM) within the project has been added to each node with the purpose to store data signatures, metadata, and other small items, allowing deferred writes, metadata requests and inter-disk data verification to be performed while the disk is powered off. Since the NVRAM can run frequent searches without the need to spin up a hard drive, the disk media can remain powered down more often, effectively reducing wear as well as the power consumption of a MAID.

. . .

In a simulation that uses 1 TB hard drives in a 10 PB Pergamum system structured with three inter-disk parity segments per 16-disk reliability group and 3 intra-disk parity blocks per segment, the estimated reliability came up at a MTTDL of 1.25×107 hours, or about 1400 years. Of course, that is just an estimate. But this estimate is far beyond of what we have heard so far and certainly the first true long-term storage idea we have come across.

Well, I’m not sure 1,400 years is all that long.

Its still a controversial hypothesis, but there are marks on tortoise shells found in China that date to 6,600 BCE that may be the oldest know example of human writing (the debate is whether or not the marks constitute something complex enough to be described as writing). So in the best-case scenario, we may have written words that have survived 8,600 years.

It would be nice to push digital data to at least 10,000 years. But that’s just a start. Overall, we know the past 10,000 years have been relatively benign for human beings on the Earth. We know of catastrophes in our recent past, however, such as the eruption of the Toba volcano that may have come close to wiping out early humans (just how far the population fell after the eruption is still hotly debated).

Personally, what I want is a system that can last at least 100,000 years through potential catastrophes such as another “supervolcano” eruption.

Then we can start about extending that to really long time periods.

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Comments 0 Jul 1st, 2008

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer Ouija Board

Hmmm… In September Dark Horse will release a Buffy: The Vampire Slayer-themed ouija board,

That will set you back $29.99, and Dark Horse wants you to know that “Game board for entertainment purposes only.” So, like, don’t bore anyone with it.

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Comments 1 Jul 1st, 2008

The Long Now Blog on Longterm Data Preservation

The Long Now Blog has some excellent advice on how to increase the odds that those pictures and documents you’re regularly backing up (you are regularly backing up your data, right?) will still be readable decades from now,

Format. Always try to use the most common and least proprietary file formats when saving your files. If you have important email files that you would like to preserve, save them outside of your email platform as simple text files. For other documents, it has been recommended that they be saved in the PDF or PDF/Archive format. Though the PDF format is technically considered to be proprietary, the fact that the source code is available and the PDF format is now universally accepted, it is a good solution for keeping your files and their context intact. It is important to remember that for image and sound files, the larger, higher quality files are much more readable and can be used in many more ways than files that have been reduced or compressed. Compressing files for storage or emailing causes significant data loss, so avoid this when possible.

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Comments 0 Jul 1st, 2008