Comment by dehrmann
8 months ago
> Makes you wonder how easy or difficult it will be in 30 years to 'recover' data from today.
The challenges will be different. Flash loses its charge in 30 years, most disks are encrypted, and on-site physical backups are mostly a thing of the past. The source might survive in a cloud repo, but it'll either be tied up for legal reasons or deleted when the customer stops paying the bill. But storage is cheap and getting cheaper!
Data not continuously copied is lost. Ironically the most future proof media is becoming increasingly rare. Those gold layer dvds may last well into the future but the readers will not be available.
A major plot of my fictional book is going to be the resurrection of data from a DVD recovered from an archaeological site in from the ancient North American period (from the pov of the characters). It is a significant challenge fraught with perils, including the professor responsible being threatened with failure after failure in the field, budget cuts, and political barriers. But success will be the first glimpse after thousands of years into the unknown dark age that so little is known about.
Flash seems to lose its charge a lot faster than that, -- I found ordinary SSDs left in a closet for two years to be full of errors while matched sibling drives left in running systems were fine.
Easy. The “deleted” even overwritten data can leave ghosts even multiple layers deep (think of a clay tablet or painting with multiple inscriptions)
Encryption for 30 years ago? Trivially breakable with quantum
Shor's algorithm is primarily relevant to asymmetric cryptography, and disk encryption is pretty much universally symmetric. Quantum computers do nothing to break modern disk encryption.
> Encryption for 30 years ago? Trivially breakable with quantum
I wouldn't be so sure - quantum computers aren't nearly as effective for symmetric algorithms as they are for pre-quantum asymmetric algorithms.
I would go as far as saying anyone who mentions quantum computers breaking block encryption doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Regardless of the parent's statement, just normal compute in 30 years, plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.
I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today. The same will likely be true by 2050, quantum computing or not. I wonder how many people realise this?
Even if one disagrees with my certainty, I think people should still plan for the concept that there's a strong probability it will be so. Encryption is really not about preventing data exposure, but about delaying it.
Any other view regarding encryption means disappointment.
8 replies →
Not this tripe again.
The reality is, as soon as humanity figures out how to distinguish between two values (magnetic flux, voltage, pits/lands, etc) we use it to store more data, or move it faster.
The end.
Sure but we are talking 30 year old disks so they don’t have that
Don't forget that flash drives are not accessed linearly. Your data might look linear to you, but without that sector addressing table, you're looking at noise.
On top of that static wear leveling can move all your data around when your disk is idle, and TRIM will effectively zero your unused areas when you are not looking.
So, it's a very different landscape.
Has this been proven for flash storage? Once a flash charge is depleted its gone forever, its not like magnetic storage of old.