[HN Gopher] Nanofiche: Small Storage, for Forever
___________________________________________________________________
Nanofiche: Small Storage, for Forever
Author : Paul-Craft
Score : 202 points
Date : 2023-10-22 19:50 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.archmission.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.archmission.org)
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Etched nickel fiche sheets, 2000 pages per square cm.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| One thing I was curious about in that post I didn't catch was
| what kind of reader they would need. I've been a bit curious
| about the state of microfiche readers in the recent past, and
| going much denser is going to require even more niche fiche
| reacher. I mean reader. They list the unusual machine as a
| downside for microfiche, but don't mention what kind of machine
| they'll need.
| rolfvandekrol wrote:
| In the FAQ on https://nanofiche.com/services/ they claim that a
| microscope should be sufficient to retrieve the engraved
| information.
| barbegal wrote:
| The numbers suggest a ~1000:1 reduction in scale so a 1000x
| optical microscope should be more than sufficient. But finding
| the information you are searching for at that scale sounds
| difficult unless pages are indexed and numbered in both the x
| and y axes.
| tingletech wrote:
| As with microfiche, it seems like the page number should be
| sufficient as long as you know how many pages per column or
| row.
| canadaduane wrote:
| Patents are from 2010 - 2014. For most people, I guess the
| technology would be available to use in 2034?
| mrb wrote:
| Their math is erroneous. They claim at, 300 dpi, a capacity of
| 300,000 analog images, per letter size sheet of Nanofiche, and at
| 600 dpi a capacity of 150,000 images. But the jump from 300 to
| 600 dpi requires four times (not two times) the capacity. So they
| probably can store only 75,000 images at 600 dpi.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Remember it's analog tech. Perhaps the 150dpi mode doesn't
| fully exploit the resolution of the material and the higher
| modes do?
|
| I could imagine they would not want to make a single page too
| small (makes the readers more complex) so perhaps they draw the
| low-res images a bit bigger than needed.
| bombcar wrote:
| And people assume DPI and LPI (lines per inch, the vertical)
| are the same but there's no reason they have to be.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| That seemed a bit over exhuberant I think. The problem is that to
| test the hypothesis will take a really long time.
| strken wrote:
| It's really weird to me that this can be patented. Not that it's
| a bad patent, I just thought people had been doing nanometre
| scale photolithography with other metals for decades.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Lots of small steps like this get patented and have to be
| challenged in court before they're released.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Patented means it will have lower adoption and fail to store
| info that will be essential to capture on time
| genewitch wrote:
| IBM made a 3 atom wide transistor about 23 years ago, and just
| for fun constructed a model of the USS Enterprise from Star
| Trek (and no, i don't know which one, but i'd assume the one
| from TOS) out of atoms. Then they patented it and tucked it
| away in their vaults.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Seems a terrible patent:
|
| 1)Demonstrably no novelty whatsoever. "My device does what they
| do just a bit smaller" isn't novelty unless the processes
| themselves are some kind of breakthrough which these clearly
| aren't.
|
| 2)Not being obvious is one of the conditions for a patent is
| the US[1]. It seems you could make a strong argument for this
| being obvious in the sense that
|
| a)it is. "We have a thing that stores information by making it
| small. We want to store more information... I know let's make
| it smaller." is definitely an obvious chain of reasoning
|
| b)to make it more obvious they even helped your argument by
| naming their thing after the one that's a bit bigger and just
| changed the name to the next engineering prefix down in scale.
|
| 3)Very clearly undermines their whole facade about doing
| something for the benefit of humanity.
|
| [1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/essentials
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I wonder if this could be used for digital tech too. Though I
| assume the density would be pretty low then compared to other
| optical methods like Archival Blu-Rays. The longevity however is
| much higher if it really is as promised.
| livrem wrote:
| "It also worth noting that Nanofiche primarily stores data in
| analog format, but can also be used to encode digital data for
| archival preservation as well -- either as analog images of
| digital bitmaps, or in native digital formats (such as DVD
| format)". Does not say at what density.
| crtified wrote:
| (mostly joking) On the downside, it makes it really really hard
| to find post-apocalyptic evidence of alien species, from the
| other side of the universe.
|
| "Sir, we've set up our 3 kilometre array of precisely calibrated
| space telescopes, capable of detecting the slightest wobble in
| the deep space radio frequencies, and automatically translating
| all possible alien languages!"
|
| Aliens: No bueno. You'll _actually_ need to find the 1 millimetre
| disc of quantum-lithographed Nickel buried on one of our physical
| moons, 1000 light years from your location. There, you 'll find
| our entire history and knowledge! Enjoy! ;)
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I mean, if you have the tech developed enough, you could etch
| such information on every rock you come across. With something
| like nano-machines or GMO'd bacteria. Probably have some info
| in the machines/bacteria anyway, but basic text but small would
| probably be more discoverable.
|
| Imagine a stretch of desert extending past the horizon in all
| directions, each grain of sand containing a wikipedia-worth of
| information, mostly redundant. Hopefully useful, and not
| maddening like the monolith from 2001.
| eternityforest wrote:
| If you're in a scifi movie and you find a monolith, it's
| probably gonna be a hassle!
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The only sure-fire way to guarantee that important information
| can be recovered in the event of a catastrophic event, is to back
| it up with specialized archival media that are designed to
| survive and be recoverable, even without access to computers and
| electronics._
|
| I mean, I guess you don't need a computer to read this, but you
| sure do need a good microscope.
|
| I guess I'm not really entirely sure of the point. If you're
| really trying to preserve basic knowledge to restart
| civilization, I'd think you'd want libraries of full-size
| readable books spread across the world. Not something that
| requires you to first build a microscope.
|
| While if you're trying to store as much historical and
| technological data as possible, it seems like you'd want to
| encode it digitally with error correction codes, not as optically
| readable text. The encoding/decoding instructions can easily fit
| on a single cover page, optically encoded.
| Clamchop wrote:
| You're focusing on how hard it will be to read but the central
| thrust is whether it is recoverable at all.
|
| Can't read what no longer exists, by any means.
|
| Paper disintegrates without maintenance. Tape disintegrates.
| Hard drives lose magnetization. SSDs lose their charge states.
| Stone erodes. Several of these won't survive fire, water,
| magnetic fields, or radiation.
|
| Also, I don't see why you couldn't store digital data on this,
| for example as pits and lands, or base 64 text, or some other
| scheme, with error correction of your choice. (But if it's as
| durable as they say, it's not as necessary.) But, that requires
| additional effort to decode.
|
| I enjoy research into highly stable means of storing data. I
| think Microsoft Research was developing a technique of storing
| data in a 3D arrangement in glass. Very fascinating.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > Paper disintegrates without maintenance. Tape
| disintegrates. Hard drives lose magnetization. SSDs lose
| their charge states. Stone erodes. Several of these won't
| survive fire, water, magnetic fields, or radiation.
|
| Computers, peripherals, microscopes, and any other devices
| needed to access some incredibly durable archival format will
| also degrade. The information needed to produce new ones will
| need to be archived, and that material will degrade and need
| archiving.
|
| Do you know how much information is necessary to describe all
| of the details relevant to producing an extremely good
| microscope from scratch? It's not just the parts and
| materials, it's the entirety of the supply chain: the mining,
| refining, electronics, power production, and everything else.
| All of that information needs to be _accessibly_ preserved.
|
| So it begs the question, is it really easier to make the
| prerequisite for the information's use be _a working
| precision instrument_ or is it easier to just actively
| maintain lots of copies of less durable materials like books?
|
| If the sky falls tomorrow, how many years is some archive
| really useful for in _any_ format? Most of a sturdy, well-
| designed library of books will probably survive for a decade.
| A good percentage will probably survive a century. On the
| other hand, a high precision microscope probably won 't "just
| work" after a decade or two of sitting around disused in
| unideal conditions. A working power supply would probably
| last even less time.
|
| We must accept that there's some ongoing upkeep of an archive
| regardless of how durable its contents are. And while a book
| isn't as durable as some quartz or other fancy material, you
| can pretty easily make books to replace old ones even in
| pretty miserable conditions (we did it for centuries, albeit
| at great cost). There's a remarkably high cost to making sure
| there's a working microscope around, and keeping the
| information and resources necessary to make new ones and
| repair existing ones available.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| We've been able to manage to make very good microscopes for
| quite a while. It won't take much more than industrial
| revolution level tech for this to work
| bastawhiz wrote:
| If you have industrial revolution tech, you can already
| maintain and mass produce libraries of books. Probably
| quite easily.
| thewakalix wrote:
| What about all the information that was lost in the
| meantime, because you _weren 't_ maintaining it then?
| flir wrote:
| I think it would be reasonable to store a fixed-focus
| compound microscope as part of your archive. That's
| basically a tube and a couple of lenses, and it gets you to
| 500x right off the bat.
|
| But if you want to be doubly sure, include instructions for
| making a hand lens at 1x, and instructions for making a
| microscope at 5x.
| genewitch wrote:
| I love the "theory" that optical media, especially the golden
| DVDs will be readable in "100 years" or whatever hilariously
| optimistic length of time claimed. Sure, DVDs and even CDs i
| have carefully stored in a humidity controlled environment
| worked _the last time i checked_ , there's always the risk
| that the next time i pull them out of storage they won't. I
| think blu-ray is claimed to be even longer than DVD for
| storage, and i guess it makes sense in theory, the QC/QM
| needed to pack 120GB on a 12cm disc must be wild.
|
| I have books on my bookshelf that are older than 100 years
| old. I don't think 100 years is even that much to ask, seeing
| as i know who William Shakesman and Chaucer are.
|
| I'm in a unique position, though - my music is on an SD card
| traveling in space right now, thanks to some attentive
| friends who petitioned to get me on there. Or so i'm told.
| How would i know, my spaceship is in the shop.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| _plastic media_ optical disks don't last 100 years, but
| glass media optical disks do. They exist. My family's small
| business used to sell, refurbish, and maintain big
| jukeboxes for 12 inch Write-Once, Read-Many glass optical
| disks (in these big minidisc-like cartridges) for customers
| like big banks that needed guaranteed 50 year archives.
| genewitch wrote:
| have you ever read a disk that was 50 years old?
| bccdee wrote:
| You're understating how long good-quality paper will last.
| Proper archival paper lasts hundreds of years without fading
| or discolouration--we have no idea what the upper limit on
| its lifetime is.
|
| And, in practice, it doesn't matter whether the storage
| medium can't be read because it's damaged or because the
| machine to read it doesn't exist anymore. Either you can read
| it or you can't.
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| "I think Microsoft Research was developing a technique of
| storing data in a 3D arrangement in glass. Very fascinating."
|
| a-la Superman ?
| wongarsu wrote:
| If all you're trying to preserve is text, then a digital format
| would make sense. Just add "analog" images of unicode tables
| covering all used symbols, and any used error correction
| format.
|
| But if this is trying to entice libraries with "replace your
| microfiche with this easier to maintain format, and do
| something for history while you are at it" then you need to
| store scans of newspapers, magazines, etc. Which probably means
| storing PNGs or similar. At that point, I'm not sure the
| capacity improvement over "analog" optically readable images is
| really worth the much more complex decoding setup.
|
| Both for the library use case and for the "a civilization that
| might not speak our language wants to decode this" use case the
| complexity of the decoding setup is a major factor.
| mlyle wrote:
| Since this is using halftoning and discrete dots, it's
| technically "digital". You could add some columns for error
| correction if you wanted.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I think its fine, microscopes are not that hard to make. If you
| have a potters' wheel and some abrasive you could work up to
| it. Small price for access to the old worlds' knowledge,
| certainly easier than building a record player like the voyager
| probe suggests xD
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| If you know what you're making, sure. Europeans kind of
| lucked out historically, since there was a lot of glass
| technology in the lead up to optics and then microscopes.
| Historical China got kind of fucked in that regard, since
| they did have mirrors, but porcelain was so good they never
| had to get into the glass part of the tech tree.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Oh... that's interesting. I've never thought of that aspect
| of why maybe the industrial Revolution took off in Europe
| but not China. Lenses allowed the development of the
| telescope, reading glasses (extending working years of
| scientists and engineers, etc, enabling finer work on
| clockwork mechanisms), the sextant, the barometer (and thus
| the study of vacuum that led to steam engines), and the
| microscope. All that predated the industrial Revolution,
| laying the scientific groundwork for all that followed.
|
| (Obviously things like that are multi-causal, but I had
| never heard that idea before, that the amazing porcelain of
| China kind of held back the development of glass and all
| its many, many applications.)
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Strictly speaking you only need books enough to teach the
| reader to build up to an optical 100x microscope and then use
| that to access the rest. Eventually you teach them how to build
| blue lasers and rockets to scan the silica bricks you engraved
| and stashed in a moon cave for "everything else".
| bastawhiz wrote:
| How useful are books about building an optical 100x+
| microscope from scratch to people who have survived a global
| catastrophic event? Relearning how to make blue lasers is
| probably extremely low on the list of priorities compared to,
| say, farming or desalinization. You'd be relying on a fairly
| niche group of apocalypse survivors to actively preserve the
| knowledge of microscope production so that someday in the
| not-very-near future someone might want to learn about quarks
| or sixteenth century music.
|
| It makes a lot of sense to make the most useful information
| for apocalypse survivors the most accessible information.
| Just make books about that information and keep them
| maintained. Then there's at least incentive to keep the books
| protected and maintained.
|
| Edit: it sounds like you'd probably need a 1000x to 10000x
| microscope to really read the nanofiche described in this
| article. So a potter's wheel is probably not sufficient.
| Plus, you'd need the materials and tools for working with
| glass, which might not even be feasible in an apocalypse.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| An apocalypse is not a weird time reset. You still have
| giant glass furnaces and propane and even industrial
| control systems.
|
| The tech that survives is probably an odd amalgamation, but
| chemistry is basically the thing you really want for
| society - antibiotics, explosives, and fuel.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| How can you keep propane production, giant glass
| furnaces, and industrial control systems working but you
| can't maintain a few hundred warehouses of "normal"
| archival material? Or just continuing to print books?
| krisoft wrote:
| The trick is that you would need to keep the archival
| material "continously" while the microscope tech can be
| lost, forgotten, rediscovered, and then used to read the
| material.
|
| That is if you have a thousand year gap in your archival
| material warehouse maintenance the data is lost. If you
| have a thousand year gap in your ability to make
| microscopes the data will wait around patiently.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I could imagine a safe the size of a gun safe completely
| containing a nano-fiche machine and all of the information on
| Wikipedia today. This isn't a hard problem.
|
| The hard problem is meting through the information. Fast,
| contextual search is probably the most important development we
| have today and you can't really replace it with anything but
| tons of compute and digitization. Big ass physical libraries
| don't solve this either.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't nearly store as much information as you
| might think. It's basically the intro 101 on all subjects,
| but it barely scratches the surface of serious scientific
| fields. They have a million articles. A large science
| publisher has more than that for its journals, and there are
| many large publishers.
| philipswood wrote:
| On their site they have a photo of
|
| > Wikipedia printed on a nickel book with each leaflet
| holding 8,000 pages
|
| It's tiny...
|
| https://nanofiche.com/
| krisoft wrote:
| > The hard problem is meting through the information.
|
| It doesn't have to be an instanteous thing. Just think of how
| much time schollars spend on deciphering papyrus fragments.
| If we would have a nanofiche of the contents of the library
| of Alexandria multiple departments would spend multiple
| lifetimes reading and contextualising it.
| Thorrez wrote:
| They're storing it on the moon. I think if you can manage to
| get to the moon, you'll be able to get a good enough
| microscope.
| cwillu wrote:
| Plot twist: when they get to the location, they find a
| similar plate already there from the _last_ time earthlings
| climbed out of the mud.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| ...but the reading device (not a microscope but some
| unrecognizable tech) did not survive.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| Any decently-designed library like this is going to have
| some type of easily-read instruction sheet that shows how
| the bulk of the data is encoded and how to read it,
| perhaps with plans for a device to do so.
| krisoft wrote:
| > not a microscope but some unrecognizable tech
|
| But that is the beauty of a microscope. It is not some
| "unrecognizable tech". Seeing tiny things in detail is a
| basic skill many new civilisations can re-discover on
| their own. It doesn't matter if it is our human
| descendants, smart octopuses or the silurians. They will
| be interested in seeing tiny things and thus they will
| construct their equivalent of microscopes.
|
| The important thing is sign-posting. How will they know
| where to look?
| m463 wrote:
| is it a tall, black obelisk?
| kgabis wrote:
| And after decoding and translating it starts with "We're no
| strangers to love..."
| mikeInAlaska wrote:
| When we reached the Moon in 1969, could we have read it?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Yes, extremely easily.
| krisoft wrote:
| Microscopes are old tech. The first ones were constructed
| in around 1600.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > If you're really trying to preserve basic knowledge to
| restart civilization, I'd think you'd want libraries of full-
| size readable books spread across the world. Not something that
| requires you to first build a microscope.
|
| It's not an either/or though. Optimistically we'll be able to
| store all our collective knowledge in all accessible formats,
| digital / internet accessible, libraries, etc.
|
| But nobody can see the future. Having this as a backup sounds
| great. Archive all of e.g. Wikipedia, put it in a time capsule
| along with a microscope and/or readable instructions on how to
| make one, make thousands of them and put them in landmarks,
| caves, monuments, dumb sattelites that are designed to land on
| ground in 10.000 years, the moon, around the sun with a homing
| signal (e.g. reflective surface since electronics won't work
| after 1000 years), etc.
|
| A library can catch fire, the earth may get glassed in WW3, but
| surely some of these would then survive for future generations
| or alien archeologists in the millennia to come.
| calo_star wrote:
| Book-films!
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I think my only exposure to this tech has been X-Files.
| ekianjo wrote:
| X files was microfiche
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I wish the articles would use bytes as an information storage
| measure.
| clnq wrote:
| > For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up
| to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi.
|
| All this depends on the font used, and what kind of information
| is stored. But using lorem ipsum, and Verdana, and only
| uppercase characters, spaces, and periods, I found that you can
| fit about 49,500 characters in a letter format page at "150
| dpi" [0]
|
| This is 396 million characters in a 2 x 2 cm sheet. The Latin
| ASCII alphabet has 26 letters, but in my experiment, there were
| commas and periods. Though at the resolution I used, commas and
| periods would be difficult do differentiate if there was almost
| any degradation or printing error. So let's say it's a 27
| character set. Maybe we can stick a few more numbers or symbols
| in there to get to 32, although some numbers like 1, 0, and 5
| look like letters, so not all would be usable at this
| resolution.
|
| If each character can represent 32 states, that is equivalent
| to 5 bits per character. 5 x 396 million is 1.98 short billion
| bits. That is 247.5 million bytes. Or 247.5 megabytes. This is
| in 4 square centimeters, so the data density is about 61.9
| megabytes per square centimeter.
|
| If we give up human readability and the text would be regular
| language (according to Zipf's Law), we could expect up to 0.2
| compression ratios. Or 310 megabytes per square centimeter. On
| the other hand, we could then use quite dense data storage
| methods like barcodes. But these calculations are a bit
| pointless because this is meant to be read without a computer.
|
| A DVD has a readable surface area of about 89.2 square
| centimeters on each side (some DVDs are multi-sided) and 4.7 to
| 8.5 gigabytes of storage in that space. So it stores between 54
| and 97.6 megabytes per square centimeter.
|
| For storing plain text, it might be on the same order of
| magnitude in terms of space efficiency as a DVD, but it is
| human-readable. If the data is not human readable, then it
| could be at least 5 times more efficient than a DVD. Which is
| closer to a Blu-ray disk.
|
| Back-of-the-napkin, might contain errors, many assumptions
| made. The goal is to understand the order of magnitude with
| some errors. In short - it looks like it's not 100x more or
| less efficient than writing a plain text file to a DVD.
|
| P.S. I chose Verdana as it was a quite legible sans-serif font.
| I then created a texture of random black and white pixels, and
| applied it at 25% opacity to simulate a significant degree of
| printing error at the supposed resolution they can print at.
| The font at the chosen size remained just about legible with
| that kind of interference [1]. The exception is periods and
| commas, which are difficult to tell apart. That is why I
| considered them one character before. Making the font even 10%
| smaller would make it really difficult to read. This is all not
| grounded in any technique or proper estimation method, I just
| wanted to show why it seems like going smaller might be
| difficult.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/Pi8acSk.png [1]
| https://i.imgur.com/stFkXQy.png
| 10g1k wrote:
| Star Trek magic crystal data storage:
| https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/5d-data-storage-how-do...
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Good luck finding a nanofiche "reader" in a couple of thousand
| years :-)
|
| People nowadays are struggling to find devices (and software
| drivers) to read old formats/mediums from a few decades back,
| imagine how difficult it's going to be to find a working
| nanofiche device and support for it under Windows 9000 in the
| year 9000AD.
|
| I like the idea, the nickel based storage medium, the
| improvements in capacity and all the other advantages listed, but
| I don't like the proprietary technology.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>Good luck finding a nanofiche "reader" in a couple of
| thousand years :-)
|
| A nanofice "reader" is literally just a microscope, isn't it?.
| Probably a very good microscope, which may or may not be
| difficult, given the technology of the time, but generally
| thought to be understandable. You'd store a bunch of this
| 'nanofiche' in a place, and have some diagrams/example
| documents with small text getting smaller and smaller and
| smaller, and the curious people/aliens would (hopefully)
| understand the idea, know enough about optics to magnify, and
| boom, they've got the data.
| ta93754829 wrote:
| i love this idea of storing a trail of smaller and smaller
| data, almost forcing them to invent microscopes to keep
| reading...
| crooked-v wrote:
| "Hurry up with that new microscope! I need to find out what
| happens to Frodo!"
| genewitch wrote:
| Frylock, don't touch my computer
| flavius29663 wrote:
| why force them, when you can teach them? Lay the basics of
| geometry, optics, glass etc. is human readable format, with
| ever smaller fonts.
| desmond373 wrote:
| From the looks of the page, that would be a microscope. The
| digital format would be hard but if they are actual pages of
| text then its very possible, and the text could provide
| decoding instructions.
| slyall wrote:
| Are there actually any live projects to use technology like this
| to create many distributed copies of information to "survive the
| fall of civilisation" etc?
|
| I know the Long Now foundation has the Rosetta project but that
| doesn't seem very live. It would seem straightforward to use
| technology like this to create 10,000 copies of something that
| could be widely distributed.
| photonerd wrote:
| They did. The long now used it about a decade ago.
| slyall wrote:
| But the Long Now project seems to be dormant. I'm looking for
| a live project that is doing this. Or maybe we could start
| one.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Given the long term focus of the Long Now project, wouldn't
| it be expected to look dormant?
| threeseed wrote:
| Related is Microsoft's Silica which is storing 7TB on square
| quartz glass platters.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
|
| Long-term archival storage is going to be an important industry
| as our data volumes grow.
| wmf wrote:
| I assume glass storage would degrade under radiation which is
| why they want to use nickel on the moon. Silica is cool for
| earth though.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Is this being actively used outside of Microsoft? I remember
| reading that the film industry has groups who do effectively
| nothing but copy films from one storage technology to another
| because of the size of their archives means there is always
| something stored on too-old media.
| hammock wrote:
| Don't drop one!
| mickdarling wrote:
| My favorite head slapping dumb part about Microsoft's Silica is
| the goofy little robots that are the only means to find
| unlabeled, unadorned identical glass slabs. No human readable
| filing system, no cartridge to protect the 7TB slab from
| falling and breaking. Just a goofy awkward robot that will
| certainly be robust for, what was the number, 10,000 years?
| codemac wrote:
| > Long-term archival storage is going to be an important
| industry as our data volumes grow.
|
| Unless you care about reading your data, as then it won't be
| important. Let me know when tape starts taking more of the
| global storage market share. It's a super mature, functional,
| and far higher performance storage media, and it's total
| percentage of global bytes shipped dwindle.
| ksec wrote:
| I wish we could have something for ProSumer. Right now it is
| still NAS with ZFS / BTRFS, scrub, and replacing it every 5
| years. And it is still quite expensive. ( Not to mention big /
| bulky ). And the most important thing is that I own the data,
| not another storage inside the "Cloud".
| Roark66 wrote:
| Remember the times when the biggest disks were up to ~100GB
| and LTO tape could store 1.6TB (compressed, 800GB
| uncompressed)? That's 8 biggest hdds. And now? We have
| spinning hdds bigger than the biggest lto standard. Where is
| my 160TB lto tape?
|
| It is sad there is no removable media other than maybe these
| few TB portable ssds that can be used for archival purposes.
| I _still_ have my commodore 64 datasette tapes as well as
| floppies from the start of the pc era(for me).
|
| Even for the prosumer there were iomega drives. Now, one is
| supposed to use (and trust in) the cloud. Bonkers.
| ksec wrote:
| >Where is my 160TB lto tape?
|
| Exactly! Or where is the affordable 1-5 TB Tape?!
|
| And worst of all SSD is not reliable. And apart from an
| over supply market where prices have fallen to record low
| we are at right now. NAND _cost_ wont be dropping much in
| the near future.
|
| Apart from big Enterprise, most smaller shops dont know and
| cant afford to do storage / backups.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I'm surprised we don't have OTP SD cards. Wouldn't that be
| good for a few hundred years in theory?
| photonerd wrote:
| One day this tech will be available to regular people.
|
| The LongNow used it for some random codex & then seems to have
| dropped it. Last I saw it was mostly used by one single jeweler,
| bizarrely.
| textfiles wrote:
| Hear me, and hear me clear:
|
| Fuck any proprietary format trying to own the ability to recover
| history.
| rabbitofdeath wrote:
| Why is this getting downvoted?! This is absolutely detrimental
| to any future history!
| textfiles wrote:
| Don't worry, I'll emotionally recover.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Largely because there's nothing proprietary about the
| _format_ , and even less about _recovering data_ from it
| because you just look at it under a microscope.
| komali2 wrote:
| It's not a proprietary format is it? Just a proprietary method
| of printing. It's just written text (format). Though I agree it
| should be simply open license.
| xeyownt wrote:
| In one thousand years, any format will be proprietary.
| doubloon wrote:
| over the years i have come to feel the best preservation of
| information is not actually technology, it is culture. instilling
| the cultural value of respect for knowledge and history is the
| only actual way that knowledge gets preserved.
|
| we go through cycles of anti-intellectualism as a species and the
| anti-intellectuals will always find a way to attack knowledge
| regardless of technology used to preserve it. if you carve
| stones, they will break them. if you write books they will burn
| them. if you make an internet they will firewall it or buy it or
| sue it. if you put plates of nickel on the moon, they will figure
| out how to go there, dig it up, and destroy it too. but most of
| all what they do is attack the idea of the intellectual as
| valuable to society.
|
| Look at how we treat Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan. We
| treat them like criminals, while people who jail and murder
| intellectuals we call leaders and presidents. We live in an anti-
| intellectual era right now.
|
| Not that it is not important to try. but there are some problems
| we cant solve by tech alone. We have to figure out what is wrong
| with us, as a species, that we constantly try to destroy our own
| knowledge.
| TheMode wrote:
| Is it even desirable to store data for millennia? What's wrong
| with humans wanting to destroy knowledge?
|
| As you said culture is probably the best method of
| preservation. But still fallible, and this may be a good thing!
| mperham wrote:
| I'm just trying to think what's important enough to want to store
| forever.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| I don't like this article. Especially the section titled "what is
| Nanofiche" which then lists some information about the pyramids
| and volatility of digital information with no mention of what
| Nanofiche is (although it is explained elsewhere). Plus there's
| no mention of how do you actually retrieve the archived
| information. Microfiche was developed alongside machines for
| scanning and retrieving data with some efficiency (despite being
| a mostly manual process). Nanofiche has no such proposition
| except sort of leaving the reader to visualize themselves over
| some kind of microscope.
| Animats wrote:
| This would be more useful if you could buy a device that writes
| it. I had to go look up the patents. It's a process similar to
| the way stamped Blu-Ray and DVDs are made. There's a laser
| process to make the stamping die, then a stamping process for
| production.
|
| Could this be done in one step?
| seanhunter wrote:
| You have to be _extremely_ skeptical of anyone who claims they
| are doing something for the good of humanity but then gates their
| tech behind a patent.
| xeyownt wrote:
| That's a tradeoff, 20 years protection vs 50 000 000 years
| protection.
| amtamt wrote:
| > For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up
| to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi.
|
| How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right
| gear to read these sheets?
| nielsbot wrote:
| Guess you could include instructions for building the right
| gear on a larger version of nanofiche, readable with the
| unaided eye... (1m x 1m?)
| mlyle wrote:
| > How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have
| right gear to read these sheets?
|
| ~.1 micron. Pretty small feature size. Typical letters
| might be 30 by 15 dots in a 10pt font with their 150DPI
| assumption. But it's not -that- exotic.
|
| A cheap compound optical microscope might do .4 micron,
| resulting in letters being 8 times and 4 times the spatial
| resolution. This is in the range where things are slightly
| annoying in fuzziness but still easily legible.
|
| My crappy LCD microscope for my classroom cost about $50
| and has a resolution of roughly 1 micron. It could probably
| read, with difficulty, 12pt text.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| it just needs analog magnification, so very achievable.
|
| i'm more worried about how scratch or defect resistant it
| is, given the small feature size. if you have to store it
| in some kind of case to protect against scratches, then how
| long does the case last? do you have to do this in ultra
| clean room conditions, to prevent fungus etc from being
| encased with it?
| lxgr wrote:
| Biological factors are pretty unlikely to be a concern on
| the moon :)
| devjab wrote:
| I find this to be an odd take on a VC forum. It's obviously
| marketing and mission branding, which is only natural in an age
| where we as employees flock to noble missions. I work in an
| investment bank as an example, but our investments go into
| building/running/improving green energy plants, so while our
| main mission is to make investors richer we do it by building a
| better world.
|
| I'm not sure I would've marketed it exactly this way. But this
| is because I spent almost a decade in the Danish public sector
| and I know how revolutionary long term storage will be for
| public recording. Right now we spent a very high amount of
| resources on the maintenance of data records that are rarely
| accessed but are important to public history, accountability
| and many social sciences. If you could sell those recording
| organisations a medium that didn't need near constant
| maintaining it would free up a lot of resources. Still, maybe
| it's a good choice for a company mission considering my earlier
| points as this tech will essentially sell itself. If it works
| as well as it's sold in this article.
|
| In the content of hacker news, however, why wouldn't you expect
| this to be meant to make its investors money?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Plus I thought stuff like that was done decades ago. There was
| a place you could send your docs to be microscopically engraved
| on a nickel disc.
|
| This goes back to 1995 or so: https://rosettaproject.org/
| TheMode wrote:
| How expensive is it to produce? Is it overwritable?
| xeyownt wrote:
| Now vacuum cleaners will become weapons of massive destruction!
| silenced_trope wrote:
| In the book "Death's End" by Cixin Liu, the final book of the
| "Three Body Problem" trilogy - they explore the problem of data
| storage that has to last for millions of years.
|
| In their case they end up having a "Museum of Humanity" that
| exists in man-made caves in Pluto specifically meant to merely
| have information _carved_ into the walls as all digital and other
| physical formats weren 't deemed sufficient.
|
| I suspect these data formats are similarly not sufficient.
| elcritch wrote:
| That portion of the books didn't seem too well reasoned.
| Digital encoding with high redundancy error correction and
| carved into walls would be superior to analog encodings for
| long term archival IMHO. Though more difficult to decode, any
| aliens advanced enough to reach it could reverse engineer it.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Analog text is already very redundant in the same manner as
| digital ECC. Letters mostly are different from other letters,
| and usually a single corrupt letter is obvious and one can
| tell what the author meant.
|
| Digital ECC adds an extra layer, but analog text is still
| pretty good.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| The neat thing about sci-fi is that they are fiction first and
| science second. This makes them enticing to enjoy but not
| mundanely realistic enough to be actual real life guidance.
| Good to keep in mind.
| m463 wrote:
| Not that their imagination can't be your guide. Worked for
| satellites, worked for 1984.
| reitanqild wrote:
| > Worked for satellites,
|
| Nice example!
|
| > ... worked for 1984.
|
| Another nice example, but ouch, that hurt.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| > We build and maintain ultra long-term data storage archives
| called Arch Libraries (pronounced "Ark").
|
| It's hard to take someone seriously when they claim to be acting
| on behalf of all humanity then immediately does something as
| pretentious as this. Probably made for the same kind of elitist
| types who like to spit on you as they try to demonstrate how they
| can pronounce "LaTeX" correctly.
| colordrops wrote:
| Annoying yes, but if the technology works, who cares. Does it
| work though? I can't tell from this article.
| karg_kult wrote:
| Why not just store it on the cloud?
| grammers wrote:
| Neat, I'm regularly impressed with what people come up with. I
| wish I'd have such smart ideas!
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