Microsoft's glass data storage system saves terabytes for 10,000 years
Microsoft's glass data storage system saves terabytes for 10,000 years
Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data…
From the article:
As intriguing as the idea is, we have to admit it smacks of a publicity stunt more than an earnest act of preservation. Even if the data is secure, are the robots the new points of failure? What’s to protect them from fires, floods, EMPs, and all the other threats? What about the readers, which are delicate lasers driven by algorithms? In all likelihood, any explorers in the year 12,000 that might stumble onto the remains of the Global Music Vault would just display it in a museum as a collection of crystal coasters.
I was asking myself similar questions to these, alongside even more basic details like, "What if the future computer systems simply aren't compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it's even recognized as storage media to test)?" It's the deeply fascinating problem all long-term information storage/transmission faces regarding future comprehensibility.
It's possible to reverse engineer data you have forgotten how to read.
It's impossible to read data that you know how to read, but it has become annihilated by time.
The former is far more valuable.
“What if the future computer systems simply aren’t compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it’s even recognized as storage media to test)?”
We've reconstructed archaic languages that no living person speaks from fragments of written records, I find it unlikely that we'll be completely unable to reverse engineer an ancient file system architecture - especially since the most likely course for someone actually reading one of these 1000's of years in the future is for the reader to be from a more technologically advanced civilization.
Think of what modern archeologists would give to have the equivalent of a wikipedia archive from 10,000 years ago - imagine the colossal amounts of grant funding that would be thrown at the problem if we even suspected such a thing was within reach.
Of course all the other issues about keeping the actual system safe for 10k years are totally valid, but you have to start somewhere, and getting a data storage system that can last that long even in perfect conditions is the necessary first step.
We’ve reconstructed archaic languages that no living person speaks from fragments of written records, I find it unlikely that we’ll be completely unable to reverse engineer an ancient file system architecture - especially since the most likely course for someone actually reading one of these 1000’s of years in the future is for the reader to be from a more technologically advanced civilization.
I saw another reply mention similar, and I see where you're both coming from, but seeing another reply in this vein has encouraged me to ask the question the other reply inspired which is: what if you lack the fragments needed to reverse engineer/reconstruct a means to access the information?
Chances are slim, and to be clear here, I'm by no means knocking this development, as I find it really exciting, but I also enjoy thinking through some of the different potential points of failure. Not from a cynical/pessimistic perspective, but because it's a compelling challenge and puzzle. How much else alongside this specific media may need to survive so that it may remain accessible, directly or indirectly, y'know?
That's as cool and fun to consider as the new storage media itself to me! Come to think of it, maybe I really should look into some kind of archival/museum jobs considering that...
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Might as well ask what's indicative of stone tablets from millennia ago being data to us now? These things aren't discovered and studied in a vacuum. They operate within context - where the items were found, their similarity to other better understood things, known history of data storage, etc etc.
Given enough time and disruption, sure, all context could be lost, but if that's the case, I'd assume figuring out what the weird glass cube thing is would be the least of their problems.
I would think that you could leave a Rosetta Stone with directions on how the data is stored and read. It wouldn't take much, I think. "These glass things contain information, here's how it is encoded. Here's the requirements on reading these". You could start off simple and have a rudimentary one that can be deciphered by hand that describes how to make a device that can quickly pull information from a few others that give directions on how to build another device to read the high capacity ones. You don't need a specific filesystem or computer to read it, you just need to know how to decipher it and that it IS data stored in a certain way, not just cool looking glass art.
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Id expect its something akin to average half life or whatnot, such that you can make multiple backups and further improve that number.
Honestly Im curious how something could last for over a few thousand years and not be effectively speaking eternal.
Like at a certain point, if it hasnt failed by 5,000 years, what on earth would cause it to fail after another 5,000 years? What process is slow enough to "erode" the perfectly preserved object that cant get the job done in 5,000 years, but it can get it done in 10,000?
Since I am sure error correction code is used, it is one and the same.
More importantly than the filesystem formats, for media I hope they're using codecs that are as simple and as close to raw as possible, eg: PCM and BMP. Chances are pretty high that with something like PCM data, even if nobody had any idea what it was, at some point somebody would stumble upon turning it into audio. I can't imagine ever successfully decoding HEVC data without a specification.
"Check it out, I've got terabytes on this small sheet of glass!"
proceeds to drop the glass
"Well... shit."
proceeds to drop the hard drive
"Well... shit."
I mean a solid state drive is probably going to have a better chance of surviving a drop than one made of glass. A platter drive, yeah, fair.
proceeds to drop the off site data center
"Well... shit. There goes my 3-2-1 backup strategy."
The metal platters, if not literally sliced with a chainsaw or drilled down, can be removed and read for data access, the glass cannot.
"So they told me that, according to the most advanced theories and techniques in every field, based on extensive theoretical research and experimentation, through analysis and comparison of multiple proposals, they did find a way to preserve information for about one hundred million years. And they emphasized that this was the only method known to be practicable: carving words into stone"
Good, people 10k years from now can discover everyone has been making the same mistakes forever.
And the best porn humanity has to offer, handpicked for preservation.
Guess I’ll have to buy the ‘White’ album again.
Sadly most will be filled with 10,000 year old porn
Sadly?
I've seen that anime and I don't care how old she is, she still looks way too young to be dressed like that.
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This is awesome, I was talking about this with some friends, debating what is truly the best way to store data for long term (on the scale of thousands of years)
Backing up all of human knowledge and history onto such plates actually seems like a worthy endeavor.
Imagine if we had such detailed records about civilizations thousands of years ago!
We have demonstrated time and time again that if you have a bunch of data unencrypted, it is actually quite trivial to reverse engineer it and decipher it.
Dead sea scrolls, Rosetta stone, etc.
This would be terabytes of data, and likely organized in a way to make it very intuitive to reverse engineer even by someone who has no idea how it works.
We could even case study this. Give a loaded one of these slates to some scientists who have no idea how the data on them is stored and have them try and decipher it.
If they can reasonably succeed quickly with no knowledge on how it works, then it should be easy for someone thousands of years from now too.
I've always wondered what if there are multiple paths forward. Like the next people will be completely and unrecognisably different. We could be being bombarded with information from a former civilisation and we don't know because we are just completely different.
Like if we never figured out wireless but had everything else, the history of the world could be being broadcast on the radio and we wouldn't know it.
The Voyager records came with the player and instructions for the hopeful alien discoverer to use.
So this new storage technology will probably outlast humanity since there will be no future with global warming and the late stage of capitalism.
Will we finally have a data storage technology that will surpass M-Discs?
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