Comment by perbu

3 days ago

> All media other than paper and stone will become extinct

Somewhat tangential...

I once worked for the national archives. Unlike libraries, the archives typically have the only copy of a specific piece of data. So if the lose the data, it is lost forever. My mission was to figure out how to deal with information storage in a millennial perspective.

There are tons of really interesting ways to store data. I think my favorite was printing QR codes on microfilm and then storing the film in an abandoned coal mine on Svalbard. The first frames on each roll with come with source code and instructions on how to decode the data.

FWIW; my recommendation was 3-way replicated object storage, until more stable form of storage presents itself and becomes reasonable.

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perbu

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pstuart  3 days ago

Microsoft's Project Silica is intriguing and would be perfect for this if they can get the technology simplified and commoditized. It offers the Star Trek vision of mass storage that could outlast us. Not directly applicable to the needs in your case but is interesting.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/project-silica...

  • hulitu  2 days ago

    > Microsoft's Project > if they can

    They can't. Even if they manage to ship something, they will destroy it with an "update".

    • pstuart  2 days ago

      The technology seems to work in the lab and the blocker is cheaper femto-second lasers. Others are working on similar approaches and there's likely to be real commercial projects in the future. As laser prices come down and patents expires, there is the possibility of a StarTrek-like glass storage media that can handle the flood of data being generated.

      Real Soon Now™

      Edit: The project is intended to be for Azure cold storage, so it's not directly consumer facing.

      Considering that Azure has more marketshare than GCP we should not dismiss them lightly.

      The fact that this is the case still kind of blows my mind. Azure? By those Windows guys? C'mon! Really?

mmooss  3 days ago

Interesting: What was embedded in the QR code? An identifier for the object? If it's the object's textual data that is embedded: aren't archives as interested in storing the objects as as they are in the contents? Why not images of the object?