Comment by euske
8 years ago
The thing is that nothing is good enough for keeping it for lifetime. A hardware might be broken, a supply might be discontinued and a software maintainer might disappear. You'll need to keep refreshing the data from one device to another, for the rest of your life. That said, I'm curious how easy this system can handle porting from one device or service to another, in varying formats and architectures. The only way to stay relevant is to constantly keep changing/adapting to new things.
A huge focus of the project is on human-readable schemas and formats. Even if all specs & source code of the project is lost, the data should still be recoverable from a curious archaeologist.
Between replicating between several companies as well as your own hardware & having friends & family mirror your stuff (encrypted or not), the ideas is that some copies will continue to exist.
Hardware failures are a given. Companies failing and friends & family dying is also a given. Natural disasters too. The only option seems to be trusting nothing and replicating all your data to lots of places, in future-friendly formats, and that's what Perkeep aims to do. And then a ton of tooling on top of that.
Interesting. I thought plaintext + .tar.gz or .zip format on either FAT or ext2 fs is the best bet for forward compatibility, and anything beyond that is too complex or obscure for future archaeologists. The obvious problem is the searchability, but I'd imagine in future that indexing a few TB of text/image will be a breeze.