"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Arctic"

Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by wrigglingworm on Friday January 26, 2024 @12:58PM (#39145586)

That's really cool, but wouldn't it be worthwhile to also include in the vault a device which can read all that data? Or perhaps engrave on the interior of the vault the instructions for making such a device?

Even in the past few decades storage mediums have changed pretty rapidly and what was the standard back then may be totally unusable for a layperson today. I can't imagine what changes can occur over 1000 years.

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by feoren on Friday January 26, 2024 @01:25PM (#39146006)

I'm pretty sure we don't have any digital storage media that last 1000 years, or even 100 years. There's no point even trying to read it that far in the future; it's completely gone.

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by wrigglingworm on Friday January 26, 2024 @01:40PM (#39146246)

I think you missed the point. They put it on tape and claim it will last 1000 years. Will the knowledge, ability, and devices capable of reading tape last 1000 years?

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by feoren on Friday January 26, 2024 @02:37PM (#39147080)

> I think you missed the point. They put it on tape and claim it will last 1000 years.

I didn't miss that point, because they never made that claim. At least in the linked video. If they had, it'd be bullshit.

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by wrigglingworm on Friday January 26, 2024 @03:27PM (#39147794)

https://github.blog/2022-09-20-if-you-dont-make-it-beautiful...

"This vault contains the 188 reels of hardened archival film which will preserve the 02/02/2020 snapshot of every active public GitHub repository for 1,000 years."

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by feoren on Friday January 26, 2024 @03:48PM (#39148086)

Well that goes against multiple different sources claiming that such long-term digital storage doesn't exist. Plenty of threads on data hoarding talk about the problem of keeping data fresh even a few decades. It's pretty hard to believe any film could last 1000 years, but I'm no expert and I'd love to be wrong on this one. Thanks for the link.

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by rbanffy on Friday February 02, 2024 @06:13AM (#39227400)

Bluray has an archive format that holds 100GB per disk and is rated to last 100 years in regular climate controlled storage. Should last longer in a cold environment like the vault.

One could also etch the data on a silicon wafer that could be read with a microscope (maybe indexes and retrieval instructions readable with an optical microscope, data with an electron microscope).

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Re:"Look at all your repos just chilling in a cave in the Ar... by rbanffy on Friday February 02, 2024 @06:09AM (#39227369)

A device wouldn’t last that long, but would provide a template to follow that, with detailed instructions and information about the formats and recording process, could be used to read the media.

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