I have been to nearly a dozen countries the last few years, done all kinds of fun stuff, yet almost none of it is archived in any way. I won’t cure cancer or win a Nobel Peace Prize, but I do want to keep an archive of things I’ve done, and places I’ve been.
My mother has been doing genealogy research on our ancestors, and most of the time all she can find out about them are a few Census Records or maybe a random mention in a news paper article. It takes too much work, for far too little information.
My Information Silos
I have stored my life’s information in several silos.
These Silos include Facebook, Flickr, Google Mail, and perhaps a half dozen other internet services.
Some of them let me export and take control of my data, and thanks to efforts like the Data Liberation Front, the ability to control your own data is generally improving.
But what is wrong with this picture is, I don’t really want that kind of control. Control to store my data on my hard drive is worthless — my hard drive, while it is a nice SSD and no longer spins around in circles, so the chances for physical failures is slightly reduced, it is still an Information Silo. The data is still locked up on my laptop, and this is perhaps even more risky than an online service. Most people don’t have the digital photos they took 5 years ago, let alone 10 years. People on a whole are just bad at managing their own data, on their own machines. It gets lost, it gets destroyed, and it seems to happen at a rate beyond other means, like a physical Photo album.
The problem with all of these Silos is that they are too easily killed.
Online services, like Facebook or Flickr, no matter how massive or open with their data, will some day die. Most of these companies have been around for 10 years or less as major players, how can they commit to the structure and reliability to keep my data alive forever.
Local storage, is just fraught with danger too, from seemingly simple things like operating system upgrades gone bad, the first Apple OSX Worm to break out, to things outside the computer world, like Fires or floods. The likely-hood of a few bits of data surviving the next decade is far too low, I don’t even have all my old 256kb/second mp3s anymore 
Online Backup Services
There has been a revolution in Online Backup services in the last few years, with great consumer facing services like Dropbox and ZumoDrive.
On the more technical side, Tarsnap, which I absolutely Love, combines impressive security with easier to use interfaces like tar, bringing innovation to the traditional enterprise backup systems.
All of these services are great for online backup and recovery — but their data and pricing models are still built around online storage, and online access of data. They are also new companies, most of whom are built upon other young services.
Forever Storage
We have data from centuries ago; Books were the most common storage format, many of them being transcribed by monks, which turns out to be a slightly lossy experience for the data as it migrates across languages and methods.
Not everyone will believe we can keep growing technology at the pace we have, nor that we might be able to stop death and diseases in our generation, but I do believe we are in the age where information created and stored today, could survive forever. And if you are in doubt about the advances in medical technology, you can always arrange yourself to be frozen.
When I say, Forever, I do mean, Forever, and ever.
In Science Fiction, there are many books describing these epic time lines, perhaps my favorite is The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Our species has existed for just a blip in time so far, but the technological baseline we have today, is enough for the information of our lives to live on forever.
The easy way out, is to just make everything public on places like a blog. Then you hope that Google and similar companies all cross-copy it, and hope that something will survive.
I think relying upon them is still too small minded however, when you start talking about thousands of years. Humans just don’t think in terms of geological time. The whole technical base could change — the world wide web we know today will be abandoned someday just like Gopher, and all that content will disappear into the ether.
What I want is a service that charges $100 for 100 gigabytes, guaranteed to be accessible for 1000 years.
There are small technical challenges, like how would you write to media intended to last thousands of years, where would you store it all, and how would you pass on access to this data to whomever you desire, but I think they are all solvable.
If you can store your body in cryogenic storage for thousands of years, why can’t you store your data; Not just for yourself, but for your descendants.
I might not live Forever, but I want my data to live on.
Yes! As I was coverting some of my Dad’s old films to DVD, I wondered if such a service existed. I’d probably put up with less immediate data access, and / or a higher price if I had the security of knowing that this sevice could retrieve it for me or my successors, at any point in time.
If this doesn’t exist yet anyone want to get together and build it?
Great post. I share your concern. I can see two issues. First, you cannot expect that one builds a service with such long term guarantees – even if one tries he might fail. Another issue is that the service should be able to catch up with all the innovations (storage technologies, UI, etc) during 1000 years – no company can be good for so many years as you mentioned in your post.
It seams to me that solution should be different. There should be a service which *you* own and you can host it at various provides. It is like WordPress which you can host anywhere. I solve the first problem: if your current provider is going to die you just migrate to a new one with your service. Also the service should be open and extendable in an open way. Ecosystem around the service provides plugins/extensions and new versions so that the service can evolve over time. So it solve the second problem.
BTW, my solution is very similar to the idea of building an open alternative for Facebook where each user has its one server. User hosts it somewhere, pays for it and can set up privacy rules in a way he/she likes. There were a good post by Dave Winner on this idea in context of Twitter alternative but I cannot find it anymore
Put your data in stone!
http://primera.eu/millenniata/millenniata-en.html
Maybe we should find a way to periodically export the best parts of our online lives to acid-free paper and hard bound, stored in low-oxygen storage somewhere. On the other hand, most of what I do doesn’t even mean that much to me five years later, who’s going to care that much about me 500 years from now? In a way I don’t mind joining the long wash of my ancestors who lived in Ireland and Holland, probably raising horses and cattle and farming. Live, die, others come after, amen…
You might find this useful then: http://swissdatabank.com/
The challenges aren’t technical, they’re social and legal.
Suppose some entity does guarantee that they’ll make your data accessible for 1000 years. What incentives do they have to honour that commitment 200 or 500 years from now, when you’re dead or frozen? What if there’s major political disruption, so the legal systems of the world collapse or radically change, and the rest of society no longer recognises them as a valid entity? Are they going to make the extraordinary efforts that might be required to preserve access to your data under those circumstances (just because some long-dead guy from a culture they no longer understand paid them $1000)?
Think about how we treat dead bodies. If we need to redevelop some land, and there are bodies in it, we let the archaeologists dig them up. Whether or not they had legal rights to be buried there (500 years ago) isn’t even an issue – we just ignore it. What makes you think our ancestors will be different?
“it is a nice SSD and no longer spins around in circles, so the chances for physical failures is slightly reduced”
sorry but figures say otherwise, in fact consumers SSD drives still have an higher hw failure rate than their mechanical counterparts
You might want to try tonido combined with your ssd. The closest feasible option
I’ve thought a lot about this. I still have a massive pile of analog cassette-tape letters from when I was living in Japan 15 years ago. I rsync all my digital photos and e-mail with a remote server via a daily cron task. I’m sure eventually there will be companies who at least purport to do this. Maybe you should start working on it?
AltDrive managed online backup is super secure. Data is encrypted before leaving your machine and you retain your own encryption key. So even AltDrive personnel cannot see your data. It uses SSL and AES 256 CTR mode encryption. The implementation was independently audited.
It’s secure like Tarsnap, easy to use like Mozy, and is inexpensive. And it works on Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris, etc.
I’m putting stuff on external hard drives. I backup everything so that I have 2 copies on two separate external hard drives. Not sure how long those hard drives will last. A long time I hope.
(If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound.)
If your data exists in the year 3010, and no one wants to read it, does it really exist?
Surely there are more satisfying afterlifes you could strive for?
That digital media has evolved to be transient — doesn’t that tell you something? Perhaps there’s a reason why something that happened a week ago is considered obsolete.
I think the landscape for digital storage is about to change dramatically within the next 10 years. The memristor, according to its inventor Stanley Williams, has a nanosecond-scale switching speed but the physical state can last for millions of years (his words: “geologic time”). I wrote a bit about it here:
http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2010/04/23/stanley-williams-and-the-memristor/
This is an exciting time to be alive!
Remember Zardoz ? …. data is stored in crystals in a machine called the Eternal Tabernacle… what a movie
http://everything2.com/title/Zardoz
Nothing is permanent. Unless you sprinkle infinite copies of it around the universe one fire, earthquake, solar flare, tsunami etc can wipe it out.
Joe, I’m not sure why you’re spamming your service here. A private encrypted backup service is exactly orthogonal to what we’re talking about here.
http://mashable.com/2010/06/12/google-street-view-kiss/
so with Forever storage the past could not be altered?
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As long as you realize that “guaranteed for 1000 years” implies the proviso “or we go out of business”. No series of safeguards, no matter how elaborate, can truly provide the guarantee you seek. Unless you find yourself a cave and some paint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux)!
Very good post, thanks. I never really thought about storing data in order for it to be read 1000′s of years later. Your post makes a lot of sense and hopefully some of the service providers will take note and come-up with a solution.
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